Blindsight

"If you can see it, chances are it doesn't exist." —Kate Keogh, Grounds for Suicide Five times we did it. Over five consecutive orbits we threw ourselves between the monster's jaws, let it chew at us with a trillion microscopic teeth until Theseus reeled us in and stitched us back together. We crept through Rorschach's belly in fits and starts, focusing as best we could on the tasks at hand, trying to ignore the ghosts that tickled our midbrains. Sometimes the walls flexed subtly around us. Sometimes we only thought they did. Sometimes we took refuge in our diving bell while waves of charge and magnetism spiraled languidly past, like boluses of ectoplasm coursing down the intestine of some poltergeist god. Sometimes we got caught in the open. The Gang would squabble amongst itself, uncertain which persona was which. Once I fell into a kind of waking paralysis while alien hands dragged me away down the hall; fortunately other hands brought me home, and voices that claimed to be real told me I'd made the whole thing up. Twice Amanda Bates found God, saw the fucker right there in front of her, knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that the creator not only existed but spoke to her, and her alone. Both times she lost her faith once we got her into the bell, but it was touch and go for a while; her warrior drones, drunk on power but still under line-of-sight control, staggered from their perimeters and pointed their weapons along bearings too close for comfort. The grunts died fast. Some barely lasted a single foray; a few died in minutes. The longest-lived were the slowest on the draw, half-blind, thick-witted, every command and response bottlenecked by raw high-frequency sound buzzing across their shielded eardrums. Sometimes we backed them up with others that spoke optically: faster but nervous, and even more vulnerable. Together they guarded against an opposition that had not yet shown its face. It hardly had to. Our troops fell even in the absence of enemy fire. We worked through it all, through fits and hallucinations and occasional convulsions. We tried to watch each others' backs while magnetic tendrils tugged our inner ears and made us seasick. Sometimes we vomited into our helmets; then we'd just hang on, white-faced, sucking sour air through clenched teeth while the recyclers filtered chunks and blobs from our headspace. And we'd give silent thanks for the small mercy of nonstick, static-repellent faceplates. It rapidly became obvious that my presence served as more than cannon fodder. It didn't matter that I lacked the Gang's linguistic skills or Szpindel's expertise in biology; I was another set of hands, in a place where anyone could be laid out at a moment's notice. The more people Sarasti kept in the field, the greater the odds that at least one of them would be halfway functional at any given moment. Even so, we were in barely any condition to accomplish anything. Every incursion侵犯,入侵 was an exercise in reckless 鲁莽的；轻率的 endangerment. We did it anyway. It was that or go home. The work proceeded in infinitesimal increments, hamstrung割断…的腿筋；使残废 腿筋on every front. The Gang wasn't finding any evidence of signage or speech to decipher译解(密码等), 解释, but the gross mechanics of this thing were easy enough to observe. Sometimes Rorschach partitioned itself, extruded与from连用）挤出 ridges  脊；屋脊；山脊 around its passageways like the cartilaginous [解剖]软骨的, 软骨质的 hoop箍s encircling a human trachea〈解〉气管. Over hours some of them might develop into contracting iris  虹膜s〈植〉鸢尾, into complete septa  pl.隔片, 隔壁(seprum的复数形式), lazy as warm candle wax. We seemed to be witnessing the growth of the structure in discrete 离散的；分立的；不连续的segments.Rorschach grew mainly from the tips of its thorns 荆棘；蒺藜; we'd made our incursion hundreds of meters from the nearest, but evidently the process extended at least this far back. If it was part of the normal growth process, though, it was a feeble echo of what must have been going on in the heart of the apical  顶点的,在顶点的 zones. We couldn't observe those directly, not from inside; barely a hundred meters towards the thorn the tube grew too lethal even for suicidal flesh. But over those five orbits Rorschach grew by another eight percent, as mindless and mechanical as a growing crystal. Through it all I tried to do my job. I compiled and collated, massaged data I would never understand. I watched the systems around me as best I could, factored each tic and trait into the mix. One part of my mind produced synopses and syntheses  综合体, 综合性 while another watched, incredulous不相信的,不可轻信的 and uncomprehending. Neither part could trace where those insights had come from. It was difficult, though. Sarasti wouldn't let me back outside the system. Every observation was contaminated by my own confounding 使惊讶；使疑惑；使混淆 presence in the mix. I did my best. I made no suggestions that might affect critical decisions. In the field I did what I was told to, and no more. I tried to be like one of Bates's drones, a simple tool with no initiative and no influence on the group dynamic. I think I pulled it off, for the most part. My nonsights accumulated on schedule and piled up in Theseus's transmission传动；传送 stack摞；叠, unsent. There was too much local interference to get a signal through to Earth. * Szpindel was right: the ghosts followed us back. We began to hear voices other than Sarasti's, whispering up the spine. Sometimes even the brightly-lit wraparound裹着身体的（衣服） 视野宽广的，视角宽广的world of the drum would warp使翘棱；使弯曲 and jiggle轻轻摇晃 from the corner of my eye—and more than once I saw boney headless phantoms 幻影；幻像 with too many arms, nested in the scaffolding搭脚手架用的支柱与木板. They seemed solid enough from the corner of my eye but any spot I focused on faded to shadow, to a dark translucent 半透明的 stain against the background. They were so very fragile, these ghosts. The mere act of observation drilled holes through them. Szpindel had rattled off   急促背诵地dementias 痴呆like raindrops. I went to ConSensus for enlightenment and found a whole other self buried below the limbic边的, 缘的 system, below the hindbrain, below even the cerebellum  小脑. It lived in the brain stem and it was older than the vertebrates有脊椎的（动物） themselves. It was self-contained: it heard and saw and felt, independent of all those other parts layered overtop like evolutionary afterthoughts. It dwelt on nothing but its own survival. It had no time for planning or abstract analysis, spared effort for only the most rudimentary 基本的；初步的  未充分发展的sensory processing. But it was fast, and it was dedicated, and it could react to threats in a fraction of the time it took its smarter roommates to even become aware of them. And even when it couldn't—when the obstinate不顺从的顽固的；固执的, unyielding  固执的，坚定的 不能弯曲的，坚硬的neocortex [解]新(大脑) 皮层refused to let it off the leash—still it tried to pass on what it saw, and Isaac Szpindel experienced an ineffable  说不得的  说不出的；难以言语形容的 sense of where to reach. In a way, he had a stripped-down version of the Gang in his head. Everyone did. I looked further and found God Itself in the meat of the brain, found the static that had sent Bates into rapture and Michelle into convulsions抽搐, 哄堂大笑, 社会动乱. I tracked Gray Syndrome to its headwaters in the temporal lobe. I heard voices ranting 大声说，夸张地讲 in the brains of schizophrenics[心]精神分裂症的. I found cortical皮层的, 皮质的, 有关脑皮层的 infarcts 〈医〉梗塞，梗死 that inspired people to reject their own limbs, imagined the magnetic fields that must have acted in their stead 替代,用处,好处 when Cruncher tried to dismember himself. And off in some half-forgotten pesthole  易发生传染病的场所, 瘟疫区 of Twentieth-century case studies—filed under Cotard's Syndrome—I found Amanda Bates and others of her kind, their brains torqued into denial of the very self. "I used to have a heart," one of them said listlessly from the archives. "Now I have something that beats in its place." Another demanded to be buried, because his corpse was already stinking. There was more, a whole catalog of finely-tuned dysfunctions that Rorschach had not yet inflicted 处以（刑罚），加（刑） （亦作： inflict upon） 予以（打击等），使受（痛苦等）on us. Somnambulism 梦行症，梦游症. Agnosias. Hemineglect. ConSensus served up a freak show to make any mind reel at its own fragility: a woman dying of thirst within easy reach of water, not because she couldn't see the faucet水龙头，水嘴 but because she couldn't recognize it. A man for whom the left side of the universe did not exist, who could neither perceive nor conceive of想象 the left side of his body, of a room, of a line of text. A man for whom the very concept of leftness had become literally unthinkable. Sometimes we could conceive of things and still not see them, although they stood right before us. Skyscrapers appeared out of thin air, the person talking to us changed into someone else during a momentary distraction— and we didn't notice. It wasn't magic. It was barely even misdirection. They called it inattentional  不注意,疏忽 blindness, and it had been well-known for a century or more: a tendency for the eye to simply not notice things that evolutionary experience classed as unlikely. I found the opposite of Szpindel's blindsight, a malady 缺点；弊病not in which the sighted believe they are blind but one in which the blind insist they can see. The very idea was absurd unto insanity and yet there they were, retinas   视网膜detached, optic nerves burned away, any possibility of vision denied by the laws of physics: bumping into walls, tripping over furniture, inventing endless ludicrous 可笑的；滑稽的 explanations for their clumsiness. The lights, unexpectedly turned off by some other party. A colorful bird glimpsed through the window, distracting attention from the obstacle ahead. I can see perfectly well, thank you. Nothing wrong with my eyes. Gauges in the head, Szpindel had called them. But there were other things in there too. There was a model of the world, and we didn't look outward at all; our conscious selves saw only the simulation in our heads, an interpretation of reality, endlessly refreshed by input from the senses. What happens when those senses go dark, but the model—thrown off-(kilter 良好状态) by some trauma or tumor—fails to refresh' How long do we stare in at that obsolete rendering, recycling and massaging the same old data in a desperate孤注一掷的；拼死的艰难的；危难的, subconscious act of utterly honest denial' How long before it dawns on us that the world we see no longer reflects the world we inhabit, that we are blind' Months sometimes, according to the case files. For one poor woman, a year and more. Appeals to logic fail utterly. How could you see the bird when there is no window' How do you decide where your seen half-world ends if you can't see the other half to weigh it against' If you are dead, how can you smell your own corruption' If you do not exist, Amanda,what is talking to us now' Useless. When you're in the grip of Cotard's Syndrome or hemineglect you cannot be swayed 摇摆， 摇动 by argument. When you're in thrall （常与of, to连用）奴隶；农奴to some alien artefact you know that the self is gone, that reality ends at the midline. You know it with the same unshakeable 不可动摇的, 坚定不移的certainty of any man regarding the location of his own limbs, with that hardwired awareness that needs no other confirmation. Against that conviction 犯罪有罪判决；判罪  坚信；信念；确信, what is reason' What is logic' Inside Rorschach, they had no place at all. * On the sixth orbit it acted. "It's talking to us," James said. Her eyes were wide behind the faceplate, but not bright, not manic. Around us Rorschach's guts ooze渗出；分泌出d and crawled at the corner of my eye; it still took effort to ignore the illusion. Foreign words scrabbled(将石)粗加整修,(使石)初具形态 like small animals below my brainstem as I tried to focus on a ring of finger-sized protrusions伸出, 突出 that picketed用尖桩把…围起来 a patch of wall. "It's not talking," Szpindel said from across the artery动脉. "You're hallucinating again." Bates said nothing. Two grunts hovered in the middle of the space, panning across three axes. "It's different this time," James insisted. "The geometry—it's not so symmetrical. Looks almost like the Phaistos disk." She spun slowly, pointed down the passage: "I think it's stronger down here…" "Bring Michelle out," Szpindel suggested. "Maybe she can talk some sense into you." James laughed weakly. "Never say die, do you'" She tweaked her pistol and coasted into deeper gloom. "Yes, it's definitely stronger here. There's content, superimposed 置于他物之上；添加 on—" Quick as a blink, Rorschach cut her off. I'd never seen anything move so fast before. There was none of the languor疲倦；身心疲惫 沉闷；抑郁we'd grown accustomed to from Rorschach's septa, no lazy drift to contraction; the iris snapped shut in an instant. Suddenly the artery just ended three meters ahead, with a matte-black membrane filigreed饰有金银丝细工的 in fine spiral. And the Gang of Four was on the other side. The grunts were on it immediately, lasers crackling through the air. Bates was yelling Get behind me! Stick to the walls!, kicking herself into space like an acrobat in fast-forward, taking some tactical high ground that must have been obvious to her, at least. I edged towards the perimeter周；周围；周界. Threads of superheated plasma血浆 sliced the air, shimmering. Szpindel, at the corner of my eye, hugged the opposite side of the tunnel. The walls crawled. I could see the lasers taking a toll; the septum   〈解〉隔膜；中隔peeled back from their touch like burning paper, black oily smoke writhing from its crisping  使变脆；使发硬edges and— Sudden brightness, everywhere. A riot of fractured light flooded the artery, a thousand shifting angles of incidence（常与of连用）发生率 and reflection. It was like being trapped in the belly of a kaleidoscope万花筒 千变万化的事物, pointed at the sun. Light— —and needle-sharp pain in my side, in my left arm. The smell of charred meat. A scream, cut off. Susan' You there, Susan' We're taking you first. Around me, the light died; inside me, a swarm of floaters mixed it up with the chronic half-visions Rorschach had already planted in my head. Alarms chirped（鸟）吱吱叫；（虫）唧唧叫 irritatingly in my helmet— breach, breach, breach—until the smart fabric of the suit softened and congealed （液体）凝结，凝固，冻结where the holes had been. Something stung 刺痛， 引起刺痛 maddeningly  令人发狂地, 使人恼火地in my left side. I felt as if I'd been branded打上烙印. "Keeton! Check Szpindel!" Bates had called off  取消 the lasers. The grunts closed for hand-to-hand, reaching with fiery 燃烧的；如火的 nozzles 喷嘴；管嘴and diamond-tipped claws （用爪子）撕，拉to grapple with 扭打, 抓住some prismatic 用三棱镜的 material glowing softly behind that burnt-back skin. Fibrous reflector, I realized. It had shattered the laser light, turned it to luminous shrapnel炮弹片 and thrown it back in our faces. Clever. But its surface was still alight, even with the lasers down; a diffuse glow, dipping and weaving编织, filtered through from the far side of the barrier while the drones chewed doggedly固执地, 顽强地 through the near one. After a moment it struck me: James's headlamp. "Keeton!" Right. Szpindel. His faceplate was intact. The laser had melted the Faraday mesh laminated onto the crystal, but the suit was sealing that tiny hole even now. The hole behind, drilled neatly through his forehead, remained. The eyes beneath stared at infinity. "Well'" Bates asked. She could read his vitals as easily as I, but Theseus was capable of post-mortem rebuilds. Barring brain damage. "No." The whine of drills 钻；锥 and shredders  切菜器, 撕碎机 stopped; the ambience brightened. I looked away from Szpindel's remains. The grunts had cut a hole in the septum's fibrous纤维的，纤维状的 underlayer. One of them nosed its way through to the other side. A new sound rose into the mix, a soft animal keening 哭丧, 哀恸, haunted and dissonant 刺耳的不协调的，不和谐的. For a moment I thought Rorschach was whispering to us again; its walls seemed to contract slightly around me. "James'" Bates snapped. "James!" Not James. A little girl in a woman's body in an armored spacesuit, scared out of her wits. The grunt nudged 轻触；轻推 her curled-up body back into our company. Bates took it gently. "Susan' Come back, Suze. You're safe." The grunts hovered restlessly, alert in every direction, pretending everything was under control. Bates spared me a glance—"Take Isaac."—and turned back to James. "Susan'" "N—n-no," whimpered 呜咽，抽泣a small voice, a little girl's voice. "Michelle' Is that you'" "There was a thing," the little girl said. "It grabbed me. It grabbed my leg." "We're out of here." Bates pulled the Gang back along the passage. One grunt lingered（常与on连用）苟延残喘 逗留；徘徊, watching the hole; the other took point. "It's gone," Bates said gently. "There's nothing there now. See the feed'" "You can't s-see it." Michelle whispered. "It's in—it's in—visible.." The septum receded around a curve as we retreated. 撤退；退却 The hole torn through its center watched us like the ragged 不完善的；有缺陷的pupil（眼睛的）瞳孔，瞳仁 of some great unblinking eye. It stayed empty as long as it stayed in sight. Nothing came out after us. Nothing we could see. A thought began cycling through my head, some half-assed eulogy 颂词 stolen from an eavesdropped 偷听者confessional, and try as I might I couldn't shut it down. Isaac Szpindel hadn't made the semifinals after all. * Susan James came back to us on the way up. Isaac Szpindel did not. We stripped wordlessly in the decon balloon. Bates, first out of her suit, reached for Szpindel but the Gang stopped her with a hand and a headshake. Personae segued  [用作指示语][音]继续 (in music and film) move without interruption from one song, melody, or scene to anotherone into another as they stripped the body. Susan removed helmet and backpack and breastplate. Cruncher peeled away the silvery leaded skin from collar to toe. Sascha stripped the jumpsuit and left the pale flesh naked and exposed. Except for the gloves. They left his feedback gloves in place; their fingertips forever tactile, the flesh inside forever numb. Through it all, Szpindel stared unblinking beneath the hole in his forehead. His glazed eyes focused on distant quasars 〈天〉类星体. I expected Michelle to appear in her turn and close them, but she never did. "You have eyes, but you do not see" —Jesus the Nazorean I don't know how to feel about this, I thought. He was a good man. He was decent, he was kind to me, even when he didn't know I was listening in. I didn't know him long— he wasn't a friend exactly— but still. I should miss him. I should mourn. I should feel more than this sick sinking fear that I could be next... Sarasti hadn't wasted any time. Szpindel's replacement met us as we emerged, freshly thawed（常与out连用）融解；融化, nicotine，尼古丁-scented. The rehydration [化] 再水化, 再水合of his flesh was ongoing— saline bladders clung to each thigh—although it would never entirely erase the sharpness of his features. His bones cracked when he moved. He looked past me and took the body. "Susan—Michelle...I—" The gang turned away. He coughed, began fumbling 摸索；搜寻a body condom over the corpse. "Sarasti wants everyone in the drum." "We're hot," Bates said. Even cut short, the excursion游览；短途旅行 had piled up a lethal Seivert count. Faint nausea tickled the back of my throat. "Decontaminate清除毒气；净化；消毒 later." One long pull of a zipper and Szpindel was gone, engulfed in an oily gray shroud尸衣，寿衣；裹尸布遮蔽物，覆盖物. "You—" he turned in my direction, pointed at the scorched烧焦， 烤焦，烘焦 holes in my jumpsuit. "With me." Robert Cunningham. Another prototype. Dark-haired, hollow-cheeked, a jaw you could use as a ruler. Both smoother and harsher than the man he had replaced. Where Szpindel had ticced and jerked as if static-charged, Cunningham's face held all the expression of a wax dummy's. The wetware that ran those muscles had been press-ganged into other pursuits. Even the tremors震动；地震 that afflicted the rest of his body were muted, soothed 使平息；抚慰，安慰；使安静by the nicotine he drew with every second breath. He held no cigarette now. He held only the shrouded body of his hard-luck primary and his ongoing, freshly thawed distaste（常与for连用）不喜欢；厌恶；不悦 for the ship's synthesist. His fingers trembled. Bates and the Gang moved silently up the spine. Cunningham and I followed, guiding the Shroud of Szpindel between us. My leg and side were stinging again, now that Cunningham had reminded them to. There wouldn't be much he could do about them, though. The beams would have cauterized〈医〉烧灼；烙；腐蚀 the flesh on their way through, and if they'd hit anything vital I'd have been dead already. At the hatch we broke into single-file: Szpindel first, Cunningham pushing at his heels. By the time I emerged into the drum Bates and the gang were already down on deck and taking their usual seats. Sarasti, in the flesh, watched them from the end of the conference table. His eyes were naked. From this angle the soft, full-spectrum light of the drum washed the shine from them. If you didn't look too closely, for too long, you might almost think those eyes were Human. BioMed had been spun down for my arrival. Cunningham pointed to a diagnostic couch on a section of the stilled deck that served as our infirmary医务所; I floated over and strapped（常与down, up连用）用带捆；用皮带束 myself in. Two meters away, past a waist-high guard rail that had risen from the deck, the rest of the drum rolled smoothly past. It slung Bates and the Gang and Sarasti around like weights on a string. I tapped ConSensus to hear them. James was speaking, quietly and without expression. "I noticed a new pattern in the form-constants. Something in the grating.（门窗的）格栅，格子 It looked like a signal. It got stronger as I went down the tunnel, I followed it, I blacked out. I don't remember anything more until we were on our way back. Michelle filled me in, as much as she could. That's all I know. I'm sorry." A hundred degrees away in the no-gee zone, Cunningham maneuvered his predecessor into a coffin with different options than those up front. I wondered if it would embark （常与on, in连用）开始；从事on an autopsy 验尸；尸检 during the debriefing任务报告, 任务报告中提出的情报. I wondered if we'd be able to hear the sounds it made. "Sascha," Sarasti said. "Yeah." Sascha's trademark drawl infected the voice. "I was riding Mom. Went deaf dumb and stark fucking blind when she passed out. I tried to take over but something was blocking me. Michelle, I guess. Never thought she had it in her. I couldn't even see." "But you don't lose consciousness." "I was awake the whole time, far as I know. Just completely in the dark." "Smell' Tactile'" "I could feel it when Michelle pissed in the suit. But I didn't notice anything else." Cunningham was back at my side. The inevitable cigarette had appeared between his lips. "Nothing touches you," the vampire surmised. "Nothing grabs your leg." "No," Sascha said. She didn't believe Michelle's stories about invisible monsters. None of us did; why bother, when dementia could so easily explain anything we experienced' "Cruncher." "Don't know anything," I still wasn't used to the maleness of the voice now emanating（与from连用）散发，发射，发出 from James's throat. Cruncher was a workaholic. He hardly ever surfaced in mixed company. "You're there," Sarasti reminded him. "You must remember some—" "Mom sent me patterns to parse. I was working on them. I'm still working on them," he added pointedly. "I didn't notice anything. Is that all'" I'd never been able to get a good read on him. Sometimes Cruncher seemed to have more in common with the dozens of nonconscious modules working in James's head than with sentient有感觉的，有知觉的 hubs comprising the rest of the Gang. "You feel nothing'" Sarasti pressed. "Just the patterns." "Anything significant'" "Standard phenomath spirals and gratings. But I haven't finished. Can I go now'" "Yes. Call Michelle, please." Cunningham stabbed at my wounds with anabolisers, muttering  低声说出 （生气或抱怨的话 to himself. Faint blue smoke curled between us. "Isaac found some tumors," he observed. I nodded and coughed. My throat was sore. The nausea had grown heavy enough to sink below my diaphragm横隔膜.光圈；光阑  隔膜片；振动板 "Michelle." Sarasti repeated. "I see some more here," Cunningham continued. "Along the bottom of your brain pan. Only a few dozen cells so far, they're not worth burning yet." "Here." Michelle's voice was barely audible, even through ConSensus, but at least it was the voice of an adult. "I'm here." "What do you remember, please'" "I—I felt—I was just riding Mom, and then she was gone and there was no one else, so I had to—take over…" "Do you see the septum close'" "Not really. I felt it going dark, but when I turned around we were already trapped. And then I felt something behind me, it wasn't loud or harsh it just sort of bumped, and it grabbed me, and—and— "I'm sorry," she said after a moment. "I'm a bit—woozy 糊里糊涂的，昏头昏脑的..." Sarasti waited. "Isaac," Michelle whispered. "He..." "Yes." A pause. "We're very sorry about that." "Maybe—can he be fixed'" "No. There's brain damage." There was something like sympathy in the vampire's voice, the practiced affectation of an accomplished mimic. There was something else, too, an all-but-imperceptible(觉察不到的) hunger, a subtle edge of temptation. I don't think anyone heard it but me. We were sick, and getting sicker. Predators are drawn to the weak and injured. Michelle had fallen silent again. When she continued, her voice only faltered a little: "I can't tell you much. It grabbed me. It let me go. I went to pieces, and I can't explain why except that fucking place just does things to you, and I was—weak. I'm sorry. There's not much else to tell you." "Thank you," Sarasti said after a long moment. "Can I—I'd like to leave if that's okay." "Yes," Sarasti said. Michelle sank below the surface as the Commons rotated past. I didn't see who took her place. "The grunts didn't see anything," Bates remarked. "By the time we broke through the septum the tunnel behind was empty." "Any bogey 妖怪；鬼怪〈高尔夫〉每洞的标准杆数would have had plenty of time to hightail拼命逃走, 追赶," Cunningham said. He planted his feet on the deck and grabbed a handhold; the subdrum began to move. I drifted obliquely against my restraints. "I don't disagree," Bates said, "But if there's anything we've learned about that place, it's that we can't trust our senses." "Trust Michelle's," Sarasti said. He opened a window as I grew heavier: a grunt's-eye view of a fuzzy, bright blob weaving behind the translucent waxed-paper fibers of the skinned septum. James's headlight, from the wrong side of the barrier. The image wobbled a bit as the drone staggered through some local pocket of magnetism, then replayed. Wobbled, replayed. A six-second loop. "See something next to the Gang." Non-vampires saw no such thing. Sarasti froze the image, evidently realizing as much. "Diffraction衍射, 宽龟裂状的 patterns aren't consistent with a single light source in open space. I see dimmer elements, reflective elements. Two dark objects close together, similar size, scattering使分散，驱散，分散 light here—" a cursor appeared at two utterly nondescript points on the image— "and here. One's the Gang. The other's unaccounted for." "Just a minute," Cunningham said. "If you can see it through all that, why didn't Su—why didn't Michelle see anything'" "Synesthesiac," Sarasti reminded him. "You see. She feels." BioMed jerked 急拉；猛扯slightly, locking into spin-synch with the drum; the guard rail sank back into the deck. Off in some far-off corner, something without eyes watched me watching it. "Shit," Bates whispered. "There's someone home." * They never really talked like that, by the way. You'd hear gibberish 难理解的话，无意义的声音—a half-dozen languages, a whole Babel of personal idioms—if I spoke in their real voices. Some of the simpler tics make it through: Sascha's good-natured belligerence  交战状态, Sarasti's aversion to the past tense. Cunningham lost most of his gender pronouns to an unforeseen 意外的；偶然的 glitch突然的不规则运转，突然的失灵 during the work on his temporal lobe. But it went beyond that. The whole lot of them threw English and Hindi and Hadzane into every second sentence; no real scientist would allow their thoughts to be hamstrung by the conceptual limitations of a single language. Other times they acted almost as synthesists in their own right, conversing in grunts and gestures that would be meaningless to any baseline. It's not so much that the bleeding edge lacks social skills; it's just that once you get past a certain point, formal speech is too damn slow. Except for Susan James. The walking contradiction, the woman so devoted to Communication As Unifier that she'd cut her own brain into disunified chunks to make the point. She was the only one who ever seemed to care who she was talking to. The others spoke only for themselves, even when they spoke to each other. Even James's other cores would speak their own minds in their own way, and let everyone else translate as best they could. It wasn't a problem. Everyone on Theseus could read everyone else. But that didn't matter to Susan James. She fit each of her words to their intended recipient, she accommodated. I am a conduit. I exist to bridge the gap, and I'd bridge nothing if I only told you what these people said. So I am telling you what theymeant, and it will mean as much to you as you can handle. Except for Susan James, linguist and Ringleader, whom I trust to speak for herself. * Fifteen minutes to apogee: maximum safe distance, in case Rorschach decided to hit back. Far below, the artefact's magnetic field pressed into Ben's atmosphere like God's little finger. Great dark thunderheads converged behind it; turbulent moon-sized curlicues（字的）花体 （图案的）花饰collided in its wake. Fifteen minutes to apogee, and Bates was still hoping Sarasti would change his mind. In a way, this was her fault. If she had just treated this new travail as one more cross to bear, perhaps things would have gone on more or less as before. There would have been some faint hope that Sarasti would have let us grit 发出磨擦声 our teeth and keep on going, besieged now by spring-loaded trapdoors （屋顶、天花板或地板上的）活门，暗门as well as the usual gauntlet  长手套，防护手套of Seiverts and magnets and monsters from the id. But Bates had made an issue out of it. It wasn't just another piece of shit in the sewer to her: it was the one that clogged the pipe. We're on the brink as it is, just surviving the baseline environment of this thing. If it's started taking deliberate countermeasures对策；应付；反对手段…I don't see how we can risk it. Fourteen minutes to apogee, and Amanda Bates was still regretting those words. On previous expeditions we'd charted twenty-six septa in various stages of development. We'd x-rayed them. We'd done ultrasound. We'd watched them ooze their way across passages or ebb slowly back into the walls. The iris that had snapped shut behind the Gang of Four had been a whole different animal. And what are the odds that the first one with a hair-trigger just happened to also come with antilaser prismatics用三棱镜的棱柱形的' That was no routine growth event. That thing was set for us. Set by… That was the other thing. Thirteen minutes to apogee, and Bates was worried about the tenants. It had always been breaking and entering, of course. That much hadn't changed. But when we'd jimmied 用铁撬撬开the lock we'd thought we were vandalizing  故意破坏（公共财产an empty summer cottage, still under construction. We'd thought the owners would be out of the picture for a while. We hadn't been expecting one of them to catch us on his way to take a late-night piss. And now that one had, and vanished into the labyrinth, it was natural to wonder what weapons it might keep stashed  贮藏；隐藏 under the pillow… Those septa could spring on us any time. How many are there' Are they fixed, or portable' We can't proceed without knowing these things.. At first, Bates had been surprised and delighted when Sarasti agreed with her. Twelve minutes to apogee. From this high ground, well above the static, Theseus peered（常与into连用）凝视；盯着看 down through Rorschach's wrenched 拧；扭；扭转and twisted anatomy to keep rock-steady eyes on the tiny wound we'd burned in its side. Our limpet 〈动〉帽贝 tent covered it like a blister; inside, Jack fed us a second, first-person view of the unfolding experiment. Sir. We know Rorschach is inhabited. Do we want to risk further provoking the inhabitants' Do we want to risk killing them' Sarasti hadn't quite looked at her, and hadn't quite spoken. If he had, he might have said I do not understand how meat like you survived to adulthood. Eleven minutes to apogee, and Amanda Bates was lamenting the fact—not for the first time— that this mission was not under military jurisdiction  权限；管辖范围.（常与over, of连用）司法权；裁判权 We were waiting for maximum distance before performing the experiment. Rorschach might interpret this as a hostile act, Sarasti had conceded 承认（为真或正确）   让；让与；容许in a voice that contained no trace of irony whatsoever. Now he stood before us, watching ConSensus play on the table. Reflections writhed across his naked eyes, not quite masking the deeper reflections behind them. Ten minutes to apogee. Susan James was wishing that Cunningham would put out that goddamned cigarrette. The smoke stank on its way to the ventilators通风设备；通风机；电扇, and anyway, it wasn't necessary. It was just an anabolism 合成代谢affectation, an attention-getting device; if he needed the nicotine a patch could have soothed his tremors just as easily, without the smoke and the stink. That wasn't all she was thinking, though. She was wondering why Cunningham had been summoned〈法〉传唤，传唤到庭   召唤，召呼to Sarasti's quarters earlier in the shift, why he'd looked at her so strangely afterward. I wondered about that myself. A quick check on ConSensus timestamps showed that her medical file had been accessed during that period. I checked those stats, let the shapes bounce between hemispheres: part of my brain locked on elevated oxytocin as the probable reason for that conference. There was an eighty-two percent chance that James had become too trusting for Sarasti's liking. I had no idea how I knew that. I never did. Nine minutes to apogee. Barely a molecule of Rorschach's atmosphere had been lost on our account. That was all about to change. Our view of base camp split like a dividing bacterium: one window now focused on the limpet tent, the other on a wide-angle tactical enhance of the space around it. Eight minutes to apogee. Sarasti pulled the plug. Down on Rorschach, our tent burst like a bug beneath a boot. A geyser erupted from the wound; a snowstorm swirled at its edges, its charged curlicues intricate as lace. Atmosphere gushed into vacuum, spread thin, crystallized. Briefly, the space around base campsparkled. It was almost beautiful. Bates didn't think it was beautiful at all. She watched that bleeding wound with a face as expressionless as Cunningham's, but her jaw was clenched unto tetanus 〈医〉破伤风 . Her eyes darted between views: watching for things gasping 喘气的in the shadows. Rorschach convulsed震动；震撼. Vast trunks and arteries shuddered, a seismic  地震的，有关地震的，地震引起的 tremor radiating out along the structure. The epicenter began to twist, a vast segment rotating on its axis, the breach midway along its length. Stress lines appeared where the length that rotated sheared 剪（羊毛）against the lengths to either side that didn't; the structure seemed to soften and stretch there, constricting  压缩；收缩 like a great elongate延长；拉长 balloon torqueing itself into sausage links. Sarasti clicked. Cats made something like that sound when they spied a bird on the far side of a windowpane. ConSensus groaned with the sound of worlds scraping against each other: telemetry  遥感勘测；遥测技术 from the onsite sensors, their ears to the ground. Jack's camera controls had frozen again. The image it sent was canted to talk hypocriticallyand grainy粒状的, 木纹状的, 多粒的. The pickup stared blankly at the edge of the hole we'd bored into the underworld. The groaning subsided（土地）下 陷，凹陷. 下沉；落下；坐下A final faint cloud of crystalline水晶般的；清澈透明的；清晰的 stardust虚无飘渺的事物； 梦幻般的魅力；朦胧的感觉 dissipated  放荡的；浪费的 into space, barely visible even on max enhance. No bodies. None visible, anyway. Sudden motion at base camp. At first I thought it was static on Jack's feed, playing along lines of high contrast—but no, something was definitely moving along the edges of the hole we'd burned. Something almost wriggled 扭来扭去；蠕动there, a thousand gray mycelia〈生〉菌丝（体） extruding（与from连用）挤出 from the cut surface and writhing（因剧痛）扭动身体，折腾 (writhing笔迹；字迹)slowly into the darkness. "It's—huh," Bates said. "Triggered by the pressure drop, I guess. That's one way to seal a breach." Two weeks after we'd wounded it, Rorschach had begun to heal itself. Apogee behind us now. All downhill from here. Theseus began the long drop back into enemy territory. "Doesn't use septa," Sarasti said. "My genes done gone and tricked my brainBy making fucking feel so greatThat's how the little creeps attainTheir plan to fuckin' replicateBut brain's got tricks itself, you seeTo get the bang but not the biteI got this here vasectomyMy genes can fuck themselves tonight." —The r-selectors, Trunclade First-person sex—real sex, as Chelsea insisted on calling it—was an acquired taste: jagged breathing, the raw slap and stink of sweaty skin full of pores（皮肤上的）毛孔 and blemishes瑕疵, a whole other person with a whole other set of demands and dislikes. There was definite animal appeal, no doubt about it. This was, after all, how we'd done it for millions of years. But this, this third-world carnality had always carried an element of struggle, of asynchronous不同时的,[电]异步的 patterns in conflict. There was no convergence here. There was only the rhythm of bodies in collision, a struggle for dominance, each trying to force the other into synch同时；同步. Chelsea regarded it as love in its purest form. I came to think of it as hand-to-hand combat. Before, whether fucking creations from my own menu or slip-on skins from someone else's, I had always selected the contrast and the rez, the texture and the attitude. The bodily functions, the resistance of competing desires, the endless foreplay that wears your tongue to the root and leaves your face sticky and glistening—just kinks 怪念头；乖僻，古怪（管子、头发等的）纽结，纠缠, today. Options for the masochistic. But there were no options with Chelsea. With her, everything came standard. I indulged her. I guess I was no more patient with her perversions性欲倒错；性变态 than she was with my ineptitude 愚蠢的动作；不适当的动作 at them. Other things made it worth the effort. Chelsea would argue about anything under the sun, wry and insightful and curious as a cat. She would pounce without warning. Retired to the redundant majority, she still took such simple joy in the very act of being alive. She was impulsive 易冲动的,感情用事的 and impetuous. 冲动的,鲁莽的 She cared about people. Pag. Me. She wanted to know me. She wanted in. That was proving to be a problem. "We could try it again," she said once in an aftermath of sweat and pheromones〈生化〉信息素. "And you won't even remember what you were so upset about. You won't even remember you were upset, if you don't want to." I smiled and looked away; suddenly the planes of her face were coarse粗的；粗糙的；未精炼的 and unappealing不吸引人的. "How many times is that now' Eight' Nine'" "I just want you to be happy, Cyg. True happiness is one hell of a gift, and I can give it to you if you'll let me." "You don't want me happy," I said pleasantly. "You want me customized." She mmm'd into the hollow of my throat for a moment. Then: "What'" "You just want to change me into something more, more accommodating." Chelsea lifted her head. "Look at me." I turned my head. She'd shut down the chromatophores in her cheek; the tattoo, transplanted, fluttered（鸟）拍翅振翼 now on her shoulder. "Look at my eyes," Chelsea said. I looked at the imperfect skin around them, at the capillaries 毛细管；微血管wriggling across the whites. I felt a distant bemusement困惑, 发呆 that such flawed产生裂缝，使有裂纹, decaying organs were still able to hypnotize使进入催眠状态 me on occasion. "Now," Chelsea said. "What do you mean by that'" I shrugged. "You keep pretending this is a partnership. We both know it's a competition." "A competition." "You're trying to manipulate me into playing by your rules." "What rules'" "The way you want the relationship run. I don't blame you, Chelse, not in the least. We've been trying to manipulate each other for as long as—hell, it's not even Human nature. It's mammalian." "I don't believe it." She shook her head. Ropy tendrils（植物的）卷须 of hair swung across her face. "It's the middle of the twenty-first Century and you're hitting me with this war of the sexes bullshit'" "Granted, your tweaks are a pretty radical iteration. Get right in there and reprogram your mate for optimum最好的，最佳的；最有利的 servility奴态, 卑屈." "You actually think I'm trying to, to housebreak 侵入家庭盗取, 拆屋 you' You think I'm trying to train you like a puppy'" "You're just doing what comes naturally." "I can't believe you'd pull this shit on me." "I thought you valued honesty in relationships." "What relationship' According to you there's no such thing. This is just—mutual rape, or something." "That's what relationships are." "Don't pull that shit on me." She sat up, swung her feet over the edge of the bed. Putting her back to me. "I know how I feel. If I know anything I know that much. And I only wanted to make you happy." "I know you believe that," I said gently. "I know it doesn't feel like a strategy. Nothing does when it's wired that deeply. It just feels right, it feels natural. It's nature's trick." "It's someone's fucking trick." I sat up next to her, let my shoulder brush hers. She leaned away. "I know this stuff," I said after a while. "I know how people work. It's my job." It was hers too, for that matter. Nobody who spliced brains for a living could possibly be unaware of all that basic wiring in the sub-basement. Chelsea had simply chosen to ignore it; to have admitted anything would have compromised her righteous   正当的；公正的正直的；合法的anger. I could have pointed that out too, I suppose, but I knew how much stress the system could take and I wasn't ready to test it to destruction. I didn't want to lose her. I didn't want to lose that feeling of safety, that sense that it made a difference whether I lived or died. I only wanted her to back off a bit. I only wanted room to breathe. "You can be such a reptile sometimes," she said. Mission accomplished. * Our first approach had been all caution and safety margins. This time we came in like a strike force. Scylla burned towards Rorschach at over two gees, its trajectory a smooth and predictable arc ending at the ruptured base camp. It may have even landed there, for all I know; perhaps Sarasti had two-birded the mission, programmed the shuttle for some collecting of its own. If so, it wouldn't land with us on board. Scylla spat us into space almost fifty kilometers short of the new beachhead滩头阵地, left us naked and plummeting骤然跌落；垂直落下 on some wireframe contraption奇妙的装置；新发明的玩意儿 with barely enough reaction mass for a soft landing and a quick getaway. We didn't even have control over that: success depended on unpredictability, and how better to ensure that than to not even know ourselves what we were doing' Sarasti's logic. Vampire logic. We could follow it partway: the colossal deformation that had sealed Rorschach's breach was so much slower, so much more expensive than the dropgate that had trapped the Gang. The fact that dropgates hadn't been used implied that they took time to deploy—to redistribute necessary mass, perhaps, or spring-load its reflexes. That gave us a window. We could still venture into the den so long as the lions couldn't predict our destination and set traps in advance. So long as we got out again before they could set them afterwards. "Thirty-seven minutes," Sarasti had said, and none of us could fathom 推测；揣摩；领会how he'd come to that number. Only Bates had dared to ask aloud, and he had merely glinted at her: "You can't follow." Vampire logic. From an obvious premise to an opaque conclusion. Our lives depended on it. The retros   重新流行的旧款式followed some preprogrammed algorithm that mated Newton with a roll of the dice. Our vector wasn't completely random—once we'd eliminated raceways and growth zones, areas without line-of-sight escape routes, dead ends and unbranched segments ("Boring," Sarasti said, dismissing them), barely ten percent of the artefact remained in the running. Now we dropped towards a warren  养兔子的地方；养小动物的地方 of brambles荆棘；有刺灌木；野生黑莓 eight kilometers from our original landing site. Here in the midst of our final approach, there was no way that even we could predict our precise point of impact. If Rorschach could, it deserved to win. We fell. Ridged spires and gnarled 生节, 咆哮 使有节, 扭limbs sectioned the sky wherever I looked, cut the distant starscape and the imminent superJovian into a jagged mosaic  玛赛克镶嵌细工；玛赛克镶嵌工艺 veined in black. Three kilometers away or thirty, the tip of some swollen extremity burst in a silent explosion of charged particles, a distant fog of ruptured, freezing atmosphere. Even as it faded I could make out wisps一把；一束；一绺 and streamers 狭长的彩色饰带；旗幡 swirling旋转 into complex spirals: Rorschach's magnetic field, sculpting the artefact's very breath into radioactive sleet. I'd never seen it with naked eyes before. I felt like an insect on a starry布满星星的，星光灿烂的 midwinter's night, falling through the aftermath of a forest fire. The sled 雪橇fired its brakes. I snapped back against the webbing of my harness马具，挽具, bumped against the rebounding 弹回；跳回 armored装甲的 body next to me. Sascha. Only Sascha, I remembered. Cunningham had sedated 安详的，安静的；镇静的the rest of them, left this one core lonely and alone in the group body. I hadn't even realized that that was possible with multiple personalities. She stared back at me from behind her faceplate. None of her surfaces showed through the suit. I could see nothing in her eyes. That was happening so often, these days. Cunningham was not with us. Nobody had asked why, when Sarasti assigned the berths（船舶的）停泊地，泊位（船上的）卧铺. The biologist was first among equals now, a backup restored with no other behind him. The second-least replaceable of our irreplaceable crew. It made me a better bargain. The odds I bought had increased to one in three. A silent bump shuddered up the frame. I looked forward again, past Bates on the front pallet, past the anchored drones that flanked her two to each side. The sled had launched its assault, a prefab 预制房屋；活动房屋 inflatable可充气的，充气式的 vestibule  门厅；前厅 mounted 攀登；爬上 on an explosive injection assembly n.集合;集会 that would punch through Rorschach's skin like a virus penetrating a host cell. The spindle-legged contraption dwindled and disappeared from my sight. Moments later a pinpoint sodium sun flared向外展开的（裙、裤） and died against the ebony 乌木，黑檀landscape ahead—antimatter charge, so small you could almost count the atoms, shot directly into the hull. A lot rougher than the tentative foreplay of our first date. We landed, hard, while the vestibule was still inflating使膨胀；打气. The grunts were off the sled an instant before contact, spitting tiny puffs 一股（气）；一阵（烟） of gas from their nozzles喷嘴；管嘴, arranging themselves around us in a protective rosette 玫瑰花结；蔷薇花缨穗. Bates was up next, leaping free of her restraints and sailing directly towards the swelling hab. Sascha and I unloaded the fiberop hub—a clamshell   蛤壳, <美>蛤壳式挖泥机drum half a meter thick and three times as wide—lugging 使劲拉；用力拖it between us while one of the grunts slipped through the vestibule's membranous airlock. "Let's move, people." Bates was hanging off one of the inflatable's handholds可以作抓手的地方（或东西）. "Thirty minutes to—" She fell silent. I didn't have to ask why: the advance grunt had positioned itself over the newly-blasted entrance and sent back its first postcard. Light from below. * You'd think that would have made it easier. Our kind has always feared the dark; for millions of years we huddled in caves and burrows while unseen things snuffled 带鼻音地说 and growled（动物的）吼叫，咆哮—or just waited, silent and undetectable不可分开的,不可拆卸的—in the night beyond. You'd think that any light, no matter how meager贫乏的；不足的, might strip away some of the shadows, leave fewer holes for the mind to fill with worst imaginings. You'd think. We followed the grunt down into a dim soupy多愁善感的像汤的，汤似的 glow like blood-curdled 使凝结；变稠 milk. At first it seemed as though the atmosphere itself was alight, a luminous fog that obscured遮掩；使模糊；使朦胧 anything more than ten meters distant. An illusion, as it turned out; the tunnel we emerged into was about three meters wide and lit by rows of raised glowing dashes—the size and approximate shape of dismembered human fingers—wound in a loose triple helix around the walls. We'd recorded similar ridges at the first site, although the breaks had not been so pronounced and the ridges had been anything but luminous. "Stronger in the near-infrared," Bates reported, flashing the spectrum to our HUDs. The air would have been transparent to pit vipers蝰蛇. Itwas transparent to sonar 声纳: the lead grunt sprayed the fog with click trains and discovered that the tunnel widened into some kind of chamber seventeen meters further along. Squinting in that direction I could just make out subterranean outlines through the mist. I could just make out jawed things, pulling back out of sight. "Let's go," Bates said. We plugged in the grunts, left one guarding the way out. Each of us took another as a guardian angel on point. The machines spoke to our HUDs via laser link; they spoke to each other along stiffened lengths of shielded fiberop that unspooled from the hub   轮轴,轴心trailing跟踪；尾随；追踪 in our wake. It was the best available compromise in an environment without any optima. Our tethered bodyguards would keep us all in touch during lone excursions around corners or down dead ends. Yeah. Lone excursions. Forced to either split the group or cover less ground, we were to split the group. We were speed-cartographers panning for gold. Everything we did here was an act of faith: faith that the unifying principles of Rorschach's internal architecture could be derived from the raw dimensions we'd grab on the run逃走；躲藏；匆匆忙忙. Faith that Rorschach's internal architecture even had unifying 使一致；使统一 principles. Earlier generations had worshipped  崇拜； 仰慕 malign and capricious多变的；反覆无常的；任性的 spirits. Ours put its faith in an ordered universe. Here in the Devil's Baklava, it was easy to wonder if our ancestors hadn't been closer to the mark. We moved along the tunnel. Our destination resolved to merely human eyes: not so much chamber as nexus, a knot of space formed by the convergence of a dozen tunnels angling in from different orientations. Ragged meshes of quicksilver 水银，汞 dots gleamed along several glistening surfaces; shiny protrusions poked through the substrate like a scattershot  漫无目标的 blast of ball-bearings pressed into wet clay. I looked at Bates and Sascha. "Control panel'" Bates shrugged. Her drones panned the throats around us, spraying sonar down each. My HUD sketched a patchy 不调和的；杂凑的；斑驳的 不完整的three-d model from the echoes: swathes （机器割的）一行草或谷物of paint thrown against invisible walls. We were dots near the center of a ganglion神经节，神经中枢, a tiny swarm一群人 一群动物of parasites寄生植物；寄生虫 食客，清客；依靠他人供养的人；寄生虫（指人）infesting some great hollowed host. Each tunnel curved away in a gradual spiral, each along a different orientation. Sonar could peep around those bends a few meters further than we could. Neither eyes nor ultrasonics saw anything to distinguish one choice from another. Bates pointed down one of the passageways—"Keeton—" and another— "Sascha," before turning to coast off down her own unbeaten path. I looked uneasily down mine. "Any particular—" "Twenty-five minutes," she said. I turned and jetted喷射； 喷出 slowly down my assigned passageway. The passage curved clockwise, a long unremarkable spiral; after twenty meters that curvature would have blocked any view of its entrance even if the foggy atmosphere hadn't. My drone kept point across the tunnel, its sonar clicking like the chattering（牙齿）打战；（机器）咯咯作响 啁啾；（松鼠）吱吱叫of a thousand tiny teeth, its tether unspooling back to the distant drum in the nexus  联系；关系；连结；连锁. It was a comfort, that leash. It was short. The grunts could stray ninety meters and no further, and we were under strict orders to stay under their wings at all times. This dim infested burrow might lead all the way to hell, but I would not be expected to follow it nearly so far. My cowardice 胆小，怯懦 had official sanction批准；允许；认可. 制裁 处罚 约束力 Fifty meters to go. Fifty meters and I could turn and run with my tail between my legs. In the meantime all I had to do was grit my teeth, and focus, and record: everything you see, Sarasti had said. As much as possible of what you can't. And hope that this new reduced time limit would expire before Rorschach spiked us into gibbering 猿或人）叽哩咕噜地叫，急促不清地说dementia 痴呆. The walls around me twitched and shivered like the flesh of something just-killed. Something darted（常与out, in连用）投射；发出 in and out of sight with a faint cackle of laughter. Focus. Record. If the grunt doesn't see it, it's not real. Sixty-five meters in, one of the ghosts got inside my helmet. I tried to ignore it. I tried to look away. But this phantom wasn't flickering at the edge of vision; it hovered near the center of my faceplate, floating like a spot of swirling dizziness between me and the HUD. I gritted my teeth and tried to look past, stared into the dim bloody haze of the middle distance, watched the jerky unfolding travelogues旅行记录影片叙述旅行见闻的演讲 in the little windows labeled Bates and James. Nothing out there. But in here, floating before my eyes, Rorschach's latest headfuck smeared a fuzzy thumbprint right in front of the sonar feed. "New symptom," I called in. "Nonperipheral hallucination, stable, pretty formless though. No spiking that I can—" The inset 书中的）插页，插入物，附加物marked Bates skidded hard about. "Keet—" Window and voice cut out together. Not just Bates' window, either. Sascha's inset and the drone's-eye sonarscape flickered and died at the same moment, stripped my HUD bare except for in-suit feeds and a little red readout flashing Link Down. I spun but the grunt was still there, three meters off my right shoulder. Its optical port was clearly visible, a ruby thumbnail set into the plastron. Its gun ports were visible too. Pointing at me. I froze. The drone shivered in some local electromagnetic knot as if terrified. Of me, or— Of something behind me… I started to turn. My helmet filled with sudden static, and with what sounded—faintly—like a voice: "—ucking move, Kee—not—" "Bates' Bates'" Another icon had bloomed in place of Link Down. The grunt was using radio for some reason—and though almost close enough to touch, I could barely make out the signal. A hash of Batespeak: "—to your—right in front of—" and Sascha as well, a bit more clearly: "—an't he see it'..." "See what' Sascha! Someone tell me what—see what'" "—read' Keeton, do you read'" Somehow Bates had boosted the signal; static roared like an ocean, but I could hear the words behind it. "Yes! What—" "Keep absolutely still, do you understand' Absolutely still. Acknowledge." "Acknowledged." The drone kept me in its shaky摇晃的；摇摆的；不稳的 sights, dark stereocam irises spasming  痉挛 wide, stuttering to pinpoints. "Wha—" "There's something in front of you, Keeton. Directly between you and the grunt. Can't you see it'" "N-no. My HUD's down—" Sascha broke in: "How can he not see it it's right th—" Bates barked over her: "It's man-sized, radially symmetrical, eight, nine arms. Like tentacles, but—segmented. Spiky." "I don't see anything," I said. But I did: I saw something reaching for me, in my pod back aboard Theseus. I saw something curled up motionless in the ship's spine, watching as we laid our best plans. I saw Michelle the synesthesiac, curled into a fetal ball: You can't see it...it's in—visible... "What's it doing'" I called. Why can't I see it' Why can't I see it' "Just—floating there. Kind of waving. Oh, sh—Keet—" The grunt skidded  车或车轮打滑，失控滑向一 侧sideways, as if slapped by a giant hand. It bounced off the wall and suddenly the laser link was back, filling the HUD with intelligence: first-person perspectives of Bates and Sascha racing along alien tunnels, a grunt's-eye view of a space suit with Keetonstenciled across its breastplate and there, right beside it, some thing like a rippling starfish with too many arms— The Gang barreled drive or move fast, often heedless of surroundings or conditions桶，琵琶桶around the curve and now I almost could see something with my own eyes, flickering like heat-lightning off to one side. It was large, and it was moving, but somehow my eyes just slid off every time they tried to get a fix. It's not real, I thought, giddy with hysterical relief, it's just another hallucination but then Bates sailed into view and it was right there, no flickering, no uncertainty, nothing but a collapsed probability wave and solid, undeniable mass. Exposed, it grabbed the nearest wall and scrambled 攀登；爬上，登上over our heads, segmented arms flailing用连枷打 like whips. A sudden crackling 发劈啪声；发尖而轻的爆裂声buzz in the back of my head and it was drifting free again, charred 烧成炭；把…烧黑and smoking. A stuttering click. The whine of machinery gearing down. Three grunts hovered 盘旋,翱翔in formation in the middle of the passageway. One faced the alien. I glimpsed the tip of some lethal proboscis （大象等的）长鼻sliding back into its sheath（刀、剑的）鞘，套. Bates shut the grunt down before it had finished closing its mouth. Optical links and three sets of lungs filled my helmet with a roar of heavy breathing. The offlined grunt drifted in the murky air. The alien carcass (动物)尸体, (船, 房)架子 bumped gently off the wall, twitching: a hydra of human backbones, scorched and fleshless. It didn't look much like my on-board visions after all. For some reason I couldn't put my finger on, I found that almost reassuring. The two active grunts panned the fog until Bates gave them new orders; then one turned to secure the carcass, the other to steady its fallen comrade. Bates grabbed the dead grunt and unplugged its tether. "Fall back. Slowly. I'm right behind you." I tweaked my jets. Sascha hesitated. Coils of shielded cable floated about us like umbilical cords. "Now," Bates said, plugging a feed from her own suit directly into the offlined grunt. Sascha started after me. Bates took up the rear. I watched my HUD; a swarm of multiarmed monsters would appear there any moment. They didn't. But the blackened thing against the belly of Bates' machine was real enough. Not a hallucination. Not even some understandable artefact of fear and synesthesia. Rorschach was inhabited居住. Its inhabitants were invisible. Sometimes. Sort of. And, oh yeah. We'd just killed one. * Bates threw the deactivated〈化〉使减活化，使灭活化 grunt into the sky as soon as we'd made vacuum. Its comrades 伙伴；战友 同志used it for target practice while we strapped in, firing and firing until there was nothing left but cooling vapor. Rorschach spun even that faint plasma into filigree金银细丝工艺 before it faded. Halfway back to Theseus, Sascha turned to the Major: "You—" "No." "But— they do shit on their own, right' Autonomous." "Not when they're slaved." "Malfunction' Spike'" Bates didn't answer. She called ahead. By the time we made it back Cunningham had grown another little tumor on Theseus' spine, a remote surgery packed with teleops and sensors.传感器；灵敏元件 One of the surviving grunts grabbed the carcass(动物)尸体, (船, 房)架子 and jumped ship as soon as we passed beneath the carapace, completing the delivery as we docked.入坞 停靠码头 〈天〉（航天器）在外层空间对接We were born again to the fruits of a preliminary  预备的；初步的 necropsy验尸. The holographic ghost of the dissected  解剖 仔细分析；剖析alien rose from ConSensus like some flayed剥…的皮  严斥and horrific feast.宴会；筵席 宗教节日 Its splayed 外张，外扩；成八字形 arms looked like human spinal columns. We sat around the table and waited for someone else to take the first bite. "Did you have to shoot it with microwaves'" Cunningham sniped 剪，剪开，剪断, tapping the table. "You completely cooked the animal. Every cell was blown out from the inside." Bates shook her head. "There was a malfunction 故障；障碍." He gave her a sour  酸的，有酸味的 坏脾气的；乖戾的look. "A malfunction that just happens to involve precise targeting of a moving object. It doesn't sound random to me." Bates looked back evenly. "Something flipped autonomous自治的 有自治权的 targeting from off to on. A coin toss. Random." "Random is—" "Give it a rest, Cunningham. I don't need this shit from you right now." His eyes rolled in that smooth dead face, focused suddenly on something overhead. I followed his gaze: Sarasti stared down at us like an owl猫头鹰，枭 panning for meadow牧草地 草地voles, 田鼠 drifting slowly in the Coriolis breeze. ------------------ No visor this time, either. I knew he hadn't lost it. He fixed Cunningham. "Your findings." Cunningham swallowed. Bits and pieces of alien anatomy flickered with color-coded highlights as he tapped his fingers. "Right, then. I'm afraid I can't give you much at the cellular level. There's not much left inside the membranes. Not many membranes left, for that matter. In terms of gross morphology〈生〉形态学  〈语〉词法, the specimen's dorsoventrally (relating to both the dorsal（动物）背部的，背脊的 and ventral  腹部的 sides; extending from the back to the belly)compressed and radially 放射状地 symmetrical, as you can see. Calcareous 钙质的，含钙的 exoskeleton 外骨骼, keratinised plastic cuticle 硬表皮；外皮. Nothing special." Bates looked skeptical. "Plastic skin is 'nothing special''" "Given the environment I was half-expecting a Sanduloviciu plasma. Plastic's simply refined petroleum石油. Organocarbon. This thing is carbon-based. It's even protein based, although its proteins are a great deal tougher than ours. Numerous sulphur cross-bonds for lateral 横的；侧面的 bracing, as far as I could tell from what your grunts didn't denature.  改变性质 使失去自然属性" Cunningham's eyes looked past us all; his consciousness was obviously far aft, haunting remote sensors. "The thing's tissues are saturated with magnetite. 磁铁矿 On earth you find that material in dolphin brains, migratory 迁移的，迁徙的；移栖的 birds, even some bacteria—anything that navigates or orients using magnetic fields. Moving up to macrostructures we've got a pneumatic 由压缩空气推动的；风动的  装有空气的； 可充空气的 internal skeleton, which as far as I can tell doubles as musculature.  肌肉系统Contractile tissue squeezes gas through a system of bladders that stiffen or relax each segment in the arms." The light came back into Cunningham's eyes long enough to focus on his cigarette. He brought it to his mouth, dragged deeply, set it down again. "Note the invaginations around the base of each arm." Flaccid balloons glowed orange on the virtual carcass. "Cloacae, you could call them. Everything opens into them: they eat, breathe, and defecate through the same little compartment. 分隔间；火车车厢里的小房间No other major orifices." The Gang made a face that said Sascha, grossed out. "Don't things get—clogged up' Seems inefficient." "If one gets plugged, there's eight other doors into the same system. You'll wish you were so inefficient the next time you choke on a chicken bone." "What does it eat'" Bates asked. "I couldn't say. I found gizzard-like contractiles可收缩的；有收缩性的 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   不透气的;气密的seal, by the way. In conjunction 连接词 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  （液体）渗，渗出； 漏，漏出out over her body, supplantin 取而代之，代替；排挤g Sascha's. Smoke curled from Cunningham's mouth and nose. "There's nothing central about it, as it transpires（人体或树叶）散发，蒸发，排出 泄露；渐被人知  发生. No cephalisation 头部集中化, not even clustered sense organs. The body's covered with something like eyespots, or chromatophores, or both. There are setae [动][植]刚毛, 刺毛 pl.刚毛(seta的复数形式) 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  针孔 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  视网膜. In theory that gives it enormous visual acuity 灵敏；敏捷." "A distributed telescope  望远镜 array," Bates murmured. "A chromatophore 色素胞, 色素体 underlies each eye—the pigment's some kind of cryptochrome so it's probably involved in vision, but it can also diffuse or contract through the local tissue. That implies dynamic pigment patterns, like a squid 〈动〉乌贼or a chameleon〈动〉变色蜥蜴." "Background pattern-matching'" Bates asked. "Would that explain why Siri couldn't see it'" Cunningham opened a new window and played grainy looped imagery of Siri Keeton and his unseen dance partner. The creature I hadn't noticed was ominously 恶兆地, 不吉利地solid to the cameras: a floating discoid  铁饼状的, 平圆形的 twice as wide as my own torso, arms extending from its edges like thick knotted ropes. Patterns rippled across its surface in waves; sunlight and shadow playing on a shallow seabed. 海底 "As you can see, the background doesn't match the pattern," Cunningham said. "It's not even close." "Can you explain Siri's blindness to it'" Sarasti said. "I can't," Cunningham admitted. "It's beyond ordinary crypsis. But Rorschach makes you see all sorts of things that aren't there. Not seeing something that is there might come down to essentially the same thing." "Another hallucination'" I asked. Another shrug while Cunningham sucked smoke. "There are many ways to fool the human visual system. It's interesting that the illusion failed when multiple witnesses were present, but if you want a definitive mechanism you'll have to give me more to work with than that." He stabbed his cigarette hand at the crisped remains. "But—" James took a breath, bracing herself— "We're talking about something... sophisticated, at least. Something very complex. A great deal of processing power." Cunningham nodded again. "I'd estimate nervous tissue accounts for about thirty percent of body mass." "So it's intelligent." Her voice was almost a whisper. "Not remotely." "But—thirty percent—" "Thirty percent motor and sensory wiring." Another drag. "Much like an octopus; an enormous number of neurons, 神经元，神经细胞but half of them get used up running the suckers." "My understanding is that octopi are quite intelligent," James said. "By molluscan [动]软体动物的, 似软体动物的 standards, certainly. But do you have any idea how much extra cabling you'd need if the photoreceptors [生理][动]光感受器,感光器 in your eye were spread across your entire body' You'd need about three hundred million extension cords to begin with, ranging from half a millimeter to two meters long. Which means all your signals are staggered and out of synch, which means billions of additional logic gates to cohere the input. And that just gets you a single static image, with no filtering, no interpretation, no time-series integration at all." Shiver. Drag. "Now multiply that by all the extra wiring needed to focus all those eyespots on an object, or to send all that information back to individual chromatophores, 色素胞, 色素体 and then add in the processing power you need to drive those chromatophores one at a time. Thirty percent might do all that, but I strongly doubt you'd have much left over for philosophy and science." He waved his hand -------------- in the general direction of the hold. "That—that—" "Scrambler," James suggested. Cunningham rolled his tongue around it. "Very well. That scrambler is an absolute miracle of evolutionary engineering. It's also dumb as a stick." A moment's silence. "So what is it'" James asked at last. "Somebody's pet'" "Canary in a coal mine," Bates suggested. "Perhaps not even that," Cunningham said. "Perhaps no more than a white blood cell with waldoes. 沃尔多(m.) Maintenance 维持；维修；保养 bot, 肤蝇的幼虫, 马胃蝇蛆maybe. Teleoperated, or instinct-driven. But people, we're ignoring far greater questions here. How could an anaerobe [微]厌氧性生物 even develop complex multicellular anatomy, much less move as fast as this thing did' That level of activity burns a great deal of ATP." "Maybe they don't use ATP," Bates said as I thumbnailed: adenosine  [生化]腺苷 triphosphate  [化]三磷酸盐. Cellular energy source. "It was crammed with ATP," Cunningham told her. "You can tell that much even with these remains. The question is, how can it synthesize the stuff fast enough to keep up with demand. Purely anaerobic厌氧性的（微生物） pathways wouldn't suffice."足够，充足 Nobody offered any suggestions. "Anyway," he said, "So endeth the lesson. If you want gory details, check ConSensus." He wiggled 扭动；摆动；摇摆the fingers of his free hand: the spectral dissection 解剖, 切开 vanished. "I'll keep working, but if you want any real answers go get me a live one." He butted out his cigarette against the bulkhead and stared defiantly around the drum. The others hardly reacted; their topologies still sparkled from the revelations of a few minutes before. Perhaps Cunningam's pet peeve v.(使)气恼, (使)焦躁, (使)忿怒  n.麻烦的事物, 怨恨, 触怒was more important to the Big Picture; perhaps, in a reductionist 简化论, 简化法 universe, biochemical basics should always take priority over the finer points of ETI and interspecies etiquette 礼仪，礼节. But Bates and the Gang were time-lagged, processing earlier revelations. Not just processing, either: wallowing. They clung to Cunningham's findings like convicted felons  重罪犯 who'd just discovered they might be freed on a technicality. 技术性问题 技术细节 专门性 Because the scrambler was dead at our hands, no doubt about it. But it wasn't an alien, not really. It wasn't intelligent. It was just a blood cell with waldoes. It was dumb as a stick. And property damage is so much easier to live with than murder. "Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them" —Einstein Robert Paglino had set me up with Chelsea in the first place. Maybe he felt responsible when the relationship started jumping the rails. Or maybe Chelsea, Madam Fix-It that she was, had approached him for an intervention. 插入，介入For whatever reason, it was obvious the moment we took our seats at QuBit's that his invitation had not been entirely social. He went for some neurotrope cocktail on the rocks. I stuck with Rickard's. "Still old-school," Pag said. "Still into foreplay," I observed. "That obvious, huh'" He took a sip. "That'll teach me to try the subtle approach with a professional ----------------- jargonaut." "Jargonaut's got nothing to do with it. You wouldn't have fooled a border collie." Truth be told, Pag's topology never really told me much that I didn't already know. I never really had much of an edge in reading him. Maybe we just knew each other too well. "So," he said, "spill." "Nothing to spill. She just got to know the real me." "That is bad." "What'd she tell you'" "Me' Nothing at all." I gave him a look over the top of my glass. He sighed. "She knows you're cheating on her." "I'm what'" "Cheating. With the skin." "It's based on her!" "But it isn't her." "No it isn't. It doesn't fart or fight or break into tears every time you don't want to be dragged off to meet its family. Look, I love the woman dearly, but come on. When was the last time you tried first-person fucking'" "Seventy-four," he said. "You're kidding." I'd have guessed never. "Did some third-world medical missionary  传教士work between gigs. They still bump and grind in Texas." Pag swigged his trope. "Actually, I thought it was alright." "The novelty wears off." "Evidently." "And it's not like I'm doing anything unusual here, Pag. She's the one with the kink（管子、头发等的）纽结，纠缠. 怪念头；乖僻，古怪And it's not just the sex. She keeps asking about—she keeps wanting to know things." "Like what'" "Irrelevant stuff. My life as a kid. My family. Nobody's fucking business." "She's just taking an interest. Not everyone considers childhood memories off-limits, you know." "Thanks for the insight." As if people had never taken an interest before. As if Helen hadn't taken an interest when she went through my drawers and filtered my mail and followed me from room to room, asking the drape  帘子s 褶皱；褶and the furniture why I was always so sullen and withdrawn. She'd taken such an interest that she wouldn't let me out the door until I confided in her. At twelve I'd been stupid enough to throw myself on her mercy, It's personal, Mom. I'd just rather not talk about it. Then I'd made my escape into the bathroom when she demanded to know if it was trouble online, trouble at school, was it a girl, was it a—a boy, what was it and why couldn't I just trust myown mother, don't I know I can trust her with anything' I waited out the persistent knocking and the insistent concerned voice through the door and the final, grudging 吝啬；不愿给；勉强给silence that followed. I waited until I was absolutely sure she'd gone away, I waited for five fucking hoursbefore I came out and there she was, arms folded in the hall, eyes brimming 满；盈with reproach责备；谴责 责难的话；责骂 污辱；耻辱and disappointment. That night she took the lock off the bathroom door because family should never shut each other out. Still taking an interest. "Siri," Pag said quietly. I slowed my breathing, tried again: "She doesn't just want to talk about family. She wants to meet them. She keeps trying to drag me to meet hers. I thought I was hooking up with Chelsea, you know, nobody ever told me I'd have to share airspace with..." "You do it'" "Once." Reaching, grasping things, feigning  装作，假装acceptance, feigning friendship. "It was great, if you like being ritually 依据仪式上地, 仪式上地 pawed（动物用爪）抓，扒 （动物受惊、发怒时）用脚爪扒地 （人）用手粗鲁地摸by a bunch of play-acting strangers who can't stand the sight of you and don't have ---------------- the guts to admit it." Pag shrugged, unsympathetic. "Sounds like typical old-school family. You're a synthesist, man. You deal with way wonkier 摇摇晃晃的；站不稳的dynamics than that." "I deal with other people's information. I don't vomit my own personal life into the public sphere. Whatever hybrids and the constructs I work with, they don't—" —touch— "Interrogate," I finished. "You knew Chelse was an old-fashioned girl right off the top." "Yeah, when it suits her." I gulped ale. "But she's cutting-edge when she's got a splicer 接合东西的人, 连接工具 in her hand. Which isn't to say that her strategies couldn't use some work." "Strategies." It's not a strategy, for God's sake! Can't you see I'm hurting' I'm on the fucking floor, Siri, I'm curled up in a ball because I'm hurting so much and all you can do is criticize my tactics' What do I have to do, slash my goddamn wrists' I'd shrugged and turned away. Nature's trick. "She cries," I said now. "High blood-lactate levels, makes it easy for her. It's just chemistry but she holds it up like it was some kind of IOU." Pag pursed his lips. "Doesn't mean it's an act." "Everything's an act. Everything's strategy. You know that." I snorted. "And she's miffed  使发怒，使发脾气 because I base a skin on her'" "I don't think it's so much the actual skin as the fact that you didn't tell her. You know how she feels about honesty in relationships." "Sure. She doesn't want any." He looked at me. "Give me some credit, Pag. You think I should tell her that sometimes the sight of her makes me shudder'" The system called Robert Paglino sat quietly, and sipped his drugs, and set the things he was about to say in order. He took a breath. "I can't believe you could be so fucking dumb," he said. "Yeah' Enlighten me." "Of course she wants you to tell her you only have eyes for her, you love her pores and her morning breath, and why stop at one tweak how about ten. But that doesn't mean she wants you to lie, you idiot. She wants all that stuff to be true. And—well, why can't it be'" "It isn't," I said. "Jesus, Siri. People aren't rational. You aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're—we're feeling machines that happen to think." He took a breath, and another hit. "And you already know that, or you couldn't do your job. Or at least—" He grimaced 作怪相，装鬼脸；面部的歪扭— "the system knows." "The system." Me and my protocols, he meant. My Chinese Room. I took a breath. "It doesn't work with everyone, you know." "So I've noticed. Can't read systems you're too entangled 缠住with, right' Observer effect." I shrugged. "Just as well," he said. "I don't think I'd like you all that much in that room of yours." It came out before I could stop it: "Chelse says she'd prefer a real one." He raised his eyebrows. "Real what'" "Chinese Room. She says it would have better comprehension." The Qube murmured and clattered  发出噼啪声；发出哗喇声；（转动时）发出急促的敲击声around us for a few moments. "I can see why she'd say that," Pag said at last. "But you— you did okay, Pod-man." ------------------- "I dunno." He nodded, emphatic.  强调的，着重的  有力的，断然的"You know what they say about the road less traveled' Well, you carved your own road. I don't know why. It's like learning calligraphy  书法 using your toes, you know' Or proprioceptive [生理]本体感受的 poly neuropathy神经病. It's amazing you can do it at all; it's mind boggling  畏缩不前；犹豫 that you actually got good at it." I squinted 眯着眼看 斜视 at him. "Proprio—" "There used to be people without any sense of—well, of themselves, physically. They couldn't feel their bodies in space, had no idea how their own limbs were arranged or even if they had limbs. Some of them said they felt pithed.（柑橘等）外皮下的海绵层；似木髓的柔软组织 Disembodied. They'd send a motor signal to the hand and just have to take it on faith that it arrived. So they'd use vision to compensate 补偿；赔偿；酬报; they couldn't feel where the hand was so they'd look at it while it moved, use sight as a substitute for the normal force-feedback you and I take for granted. They could walk, if they kept their eyes focused on their legs and concentrated on every step. They'd get pretty good at it. But even after years of practice, if you distracted them in mid-step they'd go over like a beanstalk  豆茎 without a counterweight." "You're saying I'm like that'" "You use your Chinese room the way they used vision. You've reinvented empathy, almost from scratch, and in some ways—not all obviously, or I wouldn't have to tell you this—but in some ways yours is better than the original. It's why you're so good at synthesis." I shook my head. "I just observe, that's all. I watch what people do, and then I imagine what would make them do that." "Sounds like empathy to me." "It's not. Empathy's 神入；感情移入  移情 not so much about imagining how the other guy feels. It's more about imagining how you'd feel in the same place, right'" Pag frowned. "So'" "So what if you don't know how you'd feel'" He looked at me, and his surfaces were serious and completely transparent. "You're better than that, friend. You may not always act like it, but—I know you. I knew you before." "You knew someone else. I'm Pod-man, remember'" "Yeah, that was someone else. And maybe I remember him better than you do. But I'll tell you one thing." He leaned forward. "Both of you would've helped me out that day. And maybe he would've got there with good ol'-fashioned empathy while you had to cobble  用圆石砌路；在…铺圆石 （常与together连用）粗制滥造together some kind of improvised flowchart out of surplus parts, but that just makes your accomplishment all the greater. Which is why I continue to stick it out with you, old buddy. Even though you have a rod   鞭打；惩罚鞭子；笞鞭 棍棒；杆；竿up your ass the size of the Rio Spire." He held out his glass. Dutifully, I clinked 叮当作响；发叮当声it against my own. We drank. "I don't remember him," I said after a while. "What, the other Siri' Pre-Pod Siri'" I nodded. "Nothing at all'" I thought back. "Well, he was wracked  折磨；使痛苦by convulsions all the time, right' There'd be constant pain. I don't remember any pain." My glass was almost empty; I sipped to make it last. "I—I dream about him sometimes, though. About— being him." "What's it like'" "It was—colorful. Everything was more saturated, you know' Sounds, smells. Richer than life." "And now'" I looked at him. "You said it was colorful. What changed'" "I don't know. Maybe nothing. I just— I don't actually remember the dreams when I wake up any --------------- more." "So how do you know you still have them'" Pag asked. Fuck it I thought, and tipped back the last of my pint in a single gulp. "I know." "How'" I frowned, taken aback. I had to think for a few moments before I remembered. "I wake up smiling," I said. "Grunts look the enemy in the eye. Grunts know the stakes. Grunts know the price of poor strategy. What do the generals know' Overlays and Tactical plots. The whole chain of command is upside-down." —Kenneth Lubin, Zero Sum It went bad from the moment we breached. The plan had called for precise havoc along the new beachhead, subtly arranged to entrap some blood-cell-with-waldoes as it sought to repair the damage. Our job had been to set the trap and stand back, trusting Sarasti's assurances that we would not have long to wait. We had no time at all. Something squirmed in the swirling dust the moment we breached违背；不履行  突破；攻破, serpentine movement down the hole that instantly kicked Bates renowned著名的，有声望的 field initiative  主动 into high gear. Her grunts dived through and caught a scrambler twitching in their crosshairs, clinging to the wall of the passageway. It must have been stunned by the blast of our entry, a classic case of wrong-place-wrong-time. Bates took a split-second to appraise the opportunity and the plan was plasma. One of the grunts plugged the scrambler with a biopsy  活组织检查dart before I even had a chance to blink. We would have bagged the whole animal right then if Rorschach's magnetosphere hadn't chosen that moment to kick sand in our faces. As it was, by the time our grunts staggered back into action their quarry 采石场；石矿；石坑猎物   追求物；追求目标 was already disappearing around the bend. Bates was tethered to her troops; they yanked her down the rabbit hole ("Set it up!" she yelled back at Sascha) the moment she let them loose. I was tethered  （用绳或链）拴（牲口） to Bates. I barely had a chance to exchange a wide-eyed look with Sascha before being yanked away in turn. Suddenly I was inside again; the sated  充分满足，使饱享； 使厌腻biopsy dart bounced off my faceplate and flashed past, still attached to a few meters of discarded monofilament.  [纺]单(根长)丝,单纤(维)丝 Hopefully Sascha would pick it up while Bates and I were hunting; at least the mission wouldn't be a total loss if we never made it back. The grunts dragged us like bait on a hook. Bates flew like a dolphin just ahead of me, keeping effortlessly to the center of the bore with an occasional tweak  抓，拧，捏（耳朵、鼻子等）of her jets. I careened（使船）倾侧   （车辆）猛冲 off the walls just behind, trying to stabilize myself, trying to look as though I too might be in control. It was an important pretense. The whole point of being a decoy媒鸟（捕鸟时用来引诱同类鸟的鸟）   圈套；骗局 is to pass yourself off as an original. They'd even given me my own gun, pure precaution of course, more for comfort than protection. It hugged my forearm and fired plastic slugs金属块；子弹 impervious  不能渗透的   不为所动的,不受影响的to induction fields. Just Bates and I, now. A pacifist soldier, and the odds of a coin toss. Gooseflesh prickled my skin as it always had. The usual ghosts scrabbled 忙乱地搜寻；扒and clawed（用爪子）撕，拉 through my mind. This time, though, the dread seemed muted. Distant. Perhaps it was just a matter of timing, perhaps we were moving so quickly through the magnetic landscape that no one phantom had a chance to stick. Or maybe it was something else. Maybe I wasn't so afraid of ghosts because this time we were after monsters. The scrambler seemed to have thrown off whatever cobwebs   蜘蛛网；蛛丝our entrance had spun; it surged along the ------------------- walls now at full speed, its arms shooting ahead like a succession of striking snakes, slinging抡；甩；掷，抛 the body forward so fast the drones could barely keep it in sight, a writhing（因剧痛）扭动身体，折腾 silhouette 剪影；黑色的轮廓   外形；轮廓；侧影in the fog. Suddenly it leapt sideways, sailing across the width of the passageway and down some minor tributary. 支流The grunts veered  改变方向，转向   （风向）按顺时针方向顺转 in pursuit, crashing into walls, stumbling— —stopping— —and suddenly Bates was braking hard, shooting back past me as I flailed with my pistol. I was past the drones in the next instant; my leash snapped tight and snapped back, bringing me to a dead drifting stop. For a second or two I was on the front line. For a second or two I was the front line, Siri Keeton, note taker, mole, professional uncomprehender. I just floated there, breath roaring in my helmet, as a few meters further on the walls— Squirmed... Peristalsis, I thought at first. But this motion was utterly unlike the slow, undulating使波动；使起伏 waves that usually rippled along Rorschach's passageways. So hallucination, I thought instead— and then those writhing walls reached out with a thousand whiplike  鞭子似的,像鞭子的calcareous  钙质的，含钙的tongues that grabbed our quarry 猎物from every direction and tore it to pieces... Something grabbed me and spun me around. Suddenly I was locked against the chest of one of the grunts, its rear guns firing as we retreated back up the tunnel at full speed. Bates was in the arms of the other. Seething 液体）翻腾，滚 动，起泡，沸腾motion receded behind us but the image stayed stuck to the backs of my eyes, hallucinatory and point-blank in its clarity: Scramblers, everywhere. A seething infestation (害虫, 盗贼等)群袭, 出没, 横行 squirming across the walls, reaching out for the intruder侵入者，夜盗,前去袭击敌方的飞机 leaping into the lumen 流明（光通量单位）, [解]内腔 of the passageway to press their counterattack. 发起反攻；反击 Not against us. They had attacked one of their own. I'd seen three of its arms ripped off  敲诈before it had disappeared into a writhing ball in the center of the passageway. We fled. I turned to Bates—Did you see—but held my tongue. The deathly concentration on her face was unmistakable不会弄错的 even across two faceplates and three meters of methane. According to HUD she'd lobotomized [医]为...施行脑叶切开术, 使迟钝both grunts, bypassed all that wonderful autonomous decision-making circuitry entirely. She was running both machines herself, as manually as marionettes.  牵线木偶 Grainy 粒状的, 木纹状的, 多粒的turbulent echoes appeared on the rear sonar display. The scramblers had finished with their sacrifice. Now they were coming after us. My grunt stumbled and careened against the side of the passage. Jagged shards（玻璃或陶瓷器皿的）碎片 of alien décor  装饰；装璜 dug parallel gouges  弧口凿，半圆凿 across my faceplate, tenderized（经过烹调）使肉变软，使肉变嫩 chunks of thigh through the shielded fabric of my suit. I clenched down on a cry. It got out anyway. Some ridiculous in-suit alarm chirped indignantly  愤怒地an instant before a dozen rotten eggs broke open inside my helmet. I coughed. My eyes stung and watered in the reek; I could barely see Seiverts on the HUD, flashing instantly into the red. Bates drove us on without a word. My faceplate healed enough to shut off the alarm. My air began to clear. The scramblers had gained; by the time I could see clearly again they were only a few meters behind us. Up ahead Sascha came into view around the bend, Sascha who had no backup, whose other cores had all been shut down on Sarasti's orders. Susan had protested at first— "If there's any opportunity to communicate—" "There won't be," he'd said. —so there was Sascha who was more resistant to Rorschach's influence according to some criterion I never understood, curled up in a fetal ball with her gloves clamped against her helmet and I could only hope to some dusty deity 神性；神位   神；女神   奉若神明；有至高无上的权力that she'd set the trap before this place had got to her. And here came the scramblers, and Bates was shouting "Sascha! Get out of the fucking way!" and braking hard, way too soon, the scrambling horde nipping 夹；钳；掐；咬 夹掉；掐去；剪去at our heels like a riptide   潮头冲浪and Bates yelled "Sascha!" again and finally Sascha moved, kicked herself into gear and off the nearest wall and fled right back up the hole we'd blown in through. Bates yanked some joystick （飞机的）操纵杆   （游戏机的）游戏棒in her head and our warrior sedans 轿子   轿车，小轿车slewed 使旋转，使回旋and shat ------------------ sparks and bullets and dove鸽子 out after her. Sascha had set the trap just within the mouth of the breach. Bates armed it in passing with the slap of one gloved hand. Motion sensors were supposed to do the rest— but the enemy was close behind, and there was no room to spare. It went off just as I was emerging into the vestibule. The cannon net shot out behind me in a glorious exploding conic圆锥的；圆锥形的, caught something, snapped back up the rabbit hole and slammed into my grunt from behind. The recoil（枪的）反撞，反冲 kicked us against the top of the vestibule so hard I thought the fabric would tear. It held, and threw us back against the squirming things enmeshed 使入网 in our midst. Writhing backbones everywhere. Articulated arms, lashing like bony whips.  鞭子 One of them entwined   交织；缠绕my leg and squeezed like a brick python. Bates' hands waved in a frantic 发狂的；激昂的；狂乱的 dance before me and that arm came apart into dismembered segments, bouncing around the enclosure. This was all wrong. They were supposed to be in the net, they were supposed to be contained... "Sascha! Launch!" Bates barked. Another arm separated from its body and careened into the wall, coiling 盘绕；缠绕；将…卷起and uncoiling. 展开（卷着的东西） The hole had flooded with aerosol foam-core as soon as we'd pulled the net. A scrambler writhed half-embedded in that matrix, caught just a split-second too late; its central mass protruded like some great round tumor writhing with monstrous worms. "SASCHA!" Artillery.  炮兵The floor of the vestibule irised shut quick as a leg-hold trap and everything slammed against it, grunts, people, scramblers whole and in pieces. I couldn't breathe. Every thimbleful of flesh weighed a hundred kilograms. Something slapped us to one side, a giant hand batting an insect. Maybe a course correction. Maybe a collision. But ten seconds later we were weightless again, and nothing had torn us open. We floated like mites in a ping-pong ball, surrounded by a confusion of machinery and twitching body parts. There was little of anything that might pass for blood. What there was floated in clear, shuddering（由于恐怖、寒冷、憎恶）战栗；发抖 spherules 小球, 小球体. The cannon net floated like a shrink-wrapped asteroid in our midst. The things inside had wrapped their arms around themselves, around each other, curled into a shivering and unresponsive  无反应的   没有回答的 ball. Compressed methonia hissed around them, keeping them fresh for the long trip home. "Holy shit," Sascha breathed, watching them. "The bloodsucker called it." He hadn't called everything. He hadn't called a mob of multiarmed aliens ripping one of their own to pieces before my eyes. He hadn't seen that coming. Or at least, he hadn't mentioned it. I was already feeling nauseous.令人恶心的弹道学的   令人讨厌的   恶心的，想呕吐的 Bates was carefully bringing her wrists together. For a moment I could barely make out a taut dark thread of freakwire, fine as smoke, between them. Her caution was well-advised; that stuff would slice through human limbs as easily as alien ones. One of the grunts groomed修饰；使整 （动物）梳理毛发 培训；培植 its mouthparts at her shoulder, cleaning gore from its mandibles. （动物、鱼等的）颚， 下颚，下颚骨   鸟嘴的上部或下部   （昆虫及螃蟹的）上颚The freakwire vanished from my sight. Sight itself was dimming, now. The inside of this great lead balloon was going dark around me. We were coasting, purely ballistic.弹道学的 We had to trust that Scylla〈希神〉斯库拉，六头女妖 would swoop（常与down连用）猝然下降   （常与to连用）突然攻击，猝然攻击in and snatch（常与away, from连用）攫取；抢；夺取 us once we'd achieved a discreet distance from the scene of the crime. We had to trust Sarasti. That was getting harder by the hour. But he'd been right so far. Mostly. "How do you know'" Bates had asked when he'd first laid out the plan. He hadn't answered. Chances are he couldn't have, not to us, any more than a baseline could have explained brane theory to the inhabitants of Flatland. But Bates hadn't been asking about tactics anyway, not really. Maybe she'd been asking for a reason, for something to justify this ongoing trespass into foreign soil, the capture and slaughter   屠杀，杀戮   屠宰（牲畜）of its natives. On one level she already knew the reason, of course. We all did. We could not afford to merely react. -------------------- The risks were too great; we had to preempt. 以优先购买权取得   霸占Sarasti, wise beyond all of us, saw this more clearly than we. Amanda Bates knew he was right in her mind—but perhaps she didn't feel it in her gut. Perhaps, I thought as my vision failed, she was asking Sarasti to convince her. But that wasn't all she was doing. * Imagine you are Amanda Bates. The control you wield over your troops would give wet dreams and nightmares to generals of ages past. You can drop instantly into the sensorium of anyone under your command, experience the battlefield from any number of first-person perspectives. Your every soldier is loyal unto  对 death, asking no questions, obeying all commands with alacrity  敏捷 and dedication to which mere flesh could never even aspire. You don't just respect a chain of command: you are one. You are a little bit scared of your own power. You are a little bit scared of the things you've already done with it. Taking orders comes as naturally as giving them. Oh, you've been known to question policy on occasion, or seek a bigger picture than may be strictly necessary for the job at hand. Your command initiative has become the stuff of legends. But you have never disobeyed  不服从；不顺从 a direct order. When asked for your perspective, you serve it straight up and unvarnished未涂油漆的   未加修饰的；原样的— until the decision is made, and the orders handed down. Then you do your job without question. Even when questions arise, you would hardly waste time asking them unless you expected an answer you could use. Why, then, demand analytical details from a vampire' Not for information. Might as well expect the sighted to explain vision to the congenitally 天生地, 先天地 blind. Not for clarification; there was no ambiguity in Sarasti's bottom line. Not even for the benefit of poor dumb Siri Keeton, who may have missed some salient 突出的；醒目的；重要的point but is too ashamed to raise his own hand. No, there is only one reason why you might ask for such details: to challenge. To rebel, to the infinitesimal degree that rebellion is permitted once the word is given. You argued and advocated as forcefully as you could, back when Sarasti was soliciting（对金钱、帮助或协助的）恳求，乞求，索要   （妓女）拉客 input. But he ignored yours, abandoned any attempt at communication and preemptively invaded 侵略；侵占foreign territory. He knew that Rorschach might contain living beings and still he tore it open without regard for their welfare. He may have killed helpless innocents. He may have roused 叫起；唤醒   激怒an angry giant. You don't know. All you know is, you've been helping him do it. You've seen this kind of arrogance before, among your own kind. You had hoped that smarter creatures would be wiser ones. Bad enough to see such arrogant stupidity inflicted （与on连用）   予以（打击等），使受（痛苦等）   处以（刑罚），加（刑） （亦作： inflict upon）on the helpless, but to do it at these stakes beggars belief. Killing innocents is the least of the risks you're running; you're gambling with the fate of worlds, provoking conflict with a star faring technology whose sole offense was to take your picture without permission. Your dissent  异议；不同意；意见不一致has changed nothing. So you rein（与in连用）勒住（马） it in; all that slips out now is the occasional pointless question with no h  使残废；使…外形破坏；损毁…表面ope of an answer, its inherent insubordination   不顺从, 反抗so deeply buried you don't even see it yourself. If you did see it, you'd keep your mouth shut entirely—because the last thing you want is to remind Sarasti that you think he's wrong. You don't want him dwelling on that. You don't want him to think you're up to something. Because you are. Even if you're not quite ready to admit it to yourself. Amanda Bates is beginning to contemplate注视；凝视   沉思；期望 a change of command. * The laceration of my suit had done a real number on the gears. It took three solid days for Theseus to --------------- bring me back to life. But death was no excuse for falling behind the curve; I resurrected with a head full of updates clogging my inlays. I flipped through them, climbing down into the drum. The Gang of Four sat at the galley (is a ship that is propelled by human oarsmen, used for trade and warfare. )below me, staring at untouched portions of nutritionally-balanced sludge  污泥on her plate. Cunningham, over in his inherited domain, grunted at my appearance and turned back to work, the fingers of one hand tapping compulsively  强制地, 禁不住地 on the desktop. Theseus' orbit had widened during my absence, and most of its eccentricities  偏心, 古怪, [数]离心率 had been planed away. Now we kept our target in view from a more-or-less constant range of three thousand kilometers. Our orbital period lagged落后 Rorschach's by an hour—the alien crept implacably 无法和解地, 执拗地难宽恕地 ahead of us along its lower trajectory—but a supplementary burn every couple of weeks would be enough to keep it in sight. We hadspecimens now, things to be examined under conditions of our own choosing; no point in risking any more close approaches until we'd wrung every useful datum   data 的单数from what we had. Cunningham had expanded his lab space during my time in the sepulcher. He'd built holding pens, one for each scrambler, modules partitioned by a common wall and installed in a whole new hab. The microwaved carcass had been sidelined (cause (a player) to be unable to play on a team or in a game )like a discarded toy from a previous birthday, although according to the access logs Cunningham still visited it every now and then. Not that he visited any part of the new wing in person, of course. Not that he was even able to, not without suiting up and jumping across the hold. The whole compartment had been disconnected from its spinal lock and pushed to a tethered anchorage锚地；碇泊处 midway between spine and carapace: Sarasti's orders, given to minimize risk of contamination.  污染 It was no skin off Cunningham's nose. He was happier leaving his body in pseudo  表示“假、伪、拟、赝”之义gravity anyway, while his consciousness flitted  迅速飞过  搬家；迁居 between the waldoes and sensors and bric-a-brac surrounding his new pets. Theseus saw me coming and pushed a squeezebulb of sugary  似乎含糖的  谄媚的，阿谀的electrolytes  电解质，电解液from the galley dispenser. 药剂师，配药师   自动售货机The Gang didn't look up as I passed. One forefinger tapped absently against their temple, the lips pursed and twitched in the characteristic mode that said internal dialog in progress. I could never tell who was on top when they were like that. I sucked on the squeezebulb and looked in on the pens. Two cubes suffused in pale red light: in one a scrambler floated center stage, waving its segmented arms like seaweed in gentle surge. The occupant  占有者；占领者  居住者of the other cage was squeezed into a corner, four arms splayed across the converging walls; four oth ers extended, waving again, into open space. The bodies from which those arms sprouted were spheroids, not flattened disks as our first—sample had been. They were only slightly compressed, and their arms sprouted   长出； 冒出   发芽，萌芽not from a single equatorial band but from across the whole surface. Fully-extended, the floating scrambler was over two meters across. The other seemed roughly the same size. Neither moved, except for those drifting arms. Navy-blue mosaics, almost black in the longwave, rippled across their surfaces like the patterns of wind on grass. Superimposed 置于他物之上；添加 graphics plotted methane and hydrogen at reassuring Rorschach norms. Temperature and lighting, ditto同样；相同；一样. An icon for ambient electromagnetics remained dark. I dipped into the archives, watched the arrival of the aliens from two days past; each tumbling unceremoniously into its pen, balled up, hugging themselves as they bounced gently around their enclosures. Fetal position, I thought—but after a few moments the arms uncoiled, like the blooming of calcareous flowers. "Robert says Rorschach grows them," Susan James said behind me. I turned. Definitely James in there, but—muted, somehow. Her meal remained untouched. Her surfaces were dim. Except for the eyes. Those were deep, and a little hollow. "Grows'" I repeated. "In stacks. They have two navels  脐，肚脐 each." She managed a weak smile, touched her belly with one hand and the small of her back with the other. "One in front, one behind. He thinks they grow in a kind of ------------------- column, piled up. When the top one develops to a certain point, it buds 发芽；含苞待放 off from the stack and becomes free-living." The archived  存档scramblers were exploring their new environment now, climbing gingerly along the walls, unrolling their arms along the corners where the panels met. Those swollen central bodies struck me again. "So that first one, with the flattened..." "Juvenile," she agreed. "Fresh off the stack. These ones are older. They, they plump out   脱口而出as they mature 成熟；使成熟. Robert says," she added after a moment. I sucked the dregs 渣滓, 糟粕, 沉淀物from my squeezebulb. "The ship grows its own crew." "If it's a ship." James shrugged. "If they're crew." I watched them move. There wasn't much to explore; the walls were almost bare, innocent of anything but a few sensor heads and gas nozzles.  喷嘴；管嘴 The pens had their own tentacles  （动物的）触角，触须，触手and manipulators for more invasive research needs, but those had been carefully sheathed （刀、剑的）鞘，套during introduction. Still, the creatures covered the territory in careful increments, moving back and forth along parallel, invisible paths. Almost as if they were running transects. James had noticed it too. "It seems awfully systematic, 系统的；规划的；有计划的 doesn't it'" "What does Robert say about that'" "He says the behavior of honeybees and sphex wasps  蜂，黄蜂，胡蜂 is just as complex, and it's all rote 死记；死背 hardwiring. Not intelligence." "But bees still communicate, right' They do that dance, to tell the hive蜂箱,蜂房  蜂群where the flowers are." She shrugged, conceding 承认（the point. "So you still might be able to talk to these things." "Maybe. You'd think." She massaged her brow between thumb and forefinger. "We haven't got anywhere, though. We played some of their pigment patterns back to them, with variations. They don't seem to make sounds. Robert synthesized  综合；组合〈化〉合成 a bunch of noises that they might squeeze out of their cloacae if they were so inclined, but those didn't get us anywhere either. Harmonic farts, really." "So we're sticking to the blood-cells-with-waldoes model." "Pretty much. But you know, they didn't go into a loop. Hardwired animals repeat themselves. Even smart ones pace, or chew their fur. Stereotyped behaviors. But these two, they gave everything a very careful once-over and then just—shut down." They were still at it in ConSensus, slithering  不稳地滑动 （像蛇似地）滑动，扭动across one wall, then another, then another, a slow screw-thread track that would leave no square centimeter uncovered. "Have they done anything since'" I asked. She shrugged again. "Nothing spectacular. They squirm （由于不舒服或紧张）扭动身 子，局促不安when you poke them. Wave their arms back and forth—they do that pretty much constantly, but there's no information in it that we can tell. They haven't gone invisible on us or anything. We blanked the adjoining wall for a while so they could see each other, even piped audio and air feeds—Robert thought there might be some kind of pheromonal communication—but nothing. They didn't even react to each other." "Have you tried, well, motivating them'" "With what, Siri' They don't seem to care about their own company. We can't bribe them with food unless we know what they eat, which we don't. Robert says they're in no immediate danger of starvation 饥饿；饿死 anyway. Maybe when they get hungry they can deal." I killed the archival feed and reverted to   回复, 归还realtime. "Maybe they eat—I don't know, radiation. Or magnetic energy. The cage can generate magnetic fields, right'" "Tried it." She took a breath, then squared her shoulders. "But I guess these things take time. He's only had a couple of days, and I only got out of the crypt myself a day ago. We'll keep trying." "What about negative reinforcement'" I wondered. She blinked. "Hurt them, you mean." "Not necessarily anything extreme. And if they're not sentient anyway..." ------------------- Just like that, Susan went away. "Why, Keeton. you just made a suggestion. You giving up on this whole noninterference thing'" "Hello, Sascha. No, of course not. Just—making a list of what's been tried." "Good." There was an edge to her voice. "Hate to think you were slipping. We're going to grab some down time now, so maybe you could go and talk to Cunningham for a bit. Yeah, do that. "And be sure to tell him your theory about radiation-eating aliens. I bet he could use a laugh." * He stood at his post in BioMed, though his empty chair was barely a meter away. The ubiquitous无所不在的，普遍存在的 cigarette hung from between the fingers of one hand, burned down and burned out. His other hand played with itself, fingers tapping against thumb in sequence, little to index, index to little. Windows crawled with intelligence in front of him; he wasn't watching. I approached from behind. I watched his surfaces in motion. I heard the soft syllables rising from his throat: "Yit-barah v'yish-tabah v'yit-pa-ar v'yit-romam..." Not his usual litany. Not even his usual language; Hebrew, ConSensus said. It sounded almost like a prayer... He must have heard me. His topology went flat and hard and almost impossible to decipher. It was increasingly difficult getting a fix on anyone these days, but even through those topological cataract 大瀑布；洪流 白内障s Cunningham— as always— was a tougher read than most. "Keeton," he said without turning. "You're not Jewish," I said. "It was." Szpindel, I realized after a moment. Cunningham didn't do gender pronouns. But Isaac Szpindel had been an atheist. All of us were. We'd all started out that way, at least. "I didn't know you knew him," I said. It certainly wasn't policy. Cunningham sank into his chair without looking at me. In his head, and in mine, a new window opened within a frame markedElectrophoresis. I tried again. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to intru—" "What can I do for you, Siri'" "I was hoping you could bring me up to speed on your findings." A periodic chart of alien elements scrolled through the feed. Cunningham logged记入日志，记日志  航行，飞行it and started another sample. "I've documented everything. It's all in ConSensus." I made a play for ego: "It would really help to know how you'd thumbnail it, though. What you think is important can be just as vital as the data themselves." He looked at me a moment. He muttered something, repetitive  重复的, 反复性的and irrelevant. "What's important is what's missing," he said after a moment. "I've got good samples now and I still can't find the genes. Protein synthesis is almost prionic—re conformation  结构，形态 instead of the usual transcription  抄写，誊写，打字  抄本，誊本，副本；录音用某种特殊符号写成的东西pathways—but I can't figure out how those bricks get slotted 在…切口  放入狭缝 （常与in, into连用）安置，放置into the wall once they're made." "Any progress on the energy front'" I asked. "Energy'" "Aerobic metabolism on an anaerobe budget, remember' You said they had too much ATP." "That I solved." He puffed smoke; far to stern a fleck  斑点，斑纹  微粒 of alien tissue liquefied（使）溶解；（使）液化 and banded into chemical strata. "They're sprinting." Rotate that if you can. I couldn't. "How do you mean'" He sighed. "Biochemistry is a tradeoff.  (公平)交易,折衷,权衡The faster you synthesize ATP, the more expensive each -------------------- molecule becomes. It turns out scramblers are a lot more energy-efficient at making it than we are. They're just extremely slow at it, which might not be a big drawback for something that spends most of its time inactive.  不活动的不活跃的 Rorschach—whatever Rorschach started out as— could have drifted for millennia   millennium的复数before it washed up here. That's a lot of time to build up an energy reserve for bouts of high activity, and once you've laid the groundwork 基础；基本原理；根基 glycolysis  糖原酵解 is explosive. Two-thousand-fold boost, and no oxygen demand." "Scramblers sprint. Their whole lives." "They may come preloaded with ATP and burn it off throughout their lifespan." "How long would that be'" "Good question," he admitted. "Live fast, die young. If they ration it out, stay dormant most of the time—who knows'" "Huh." The free-floating scrambler had drifted away from the center of its pen. One extended arm held a wall at bay; the others continued their hypnotic 催眠的,催眠术的  引起睡眠的,安眠的swaying.摇摆， 摇动  影响 I remembere d other arms, their motion not so gentle. "Amanda and I chased one into a crowd. It—" Cunningham was back at his samples. "I saw the record." "They tore it to pieces." "Uh huh." "Any idea why'" He shrugged. "Bates thought there might be some kind of civil war going on down there." "What do you think'" "I don't know. Maybe it's right, or maybe scramblers are ritual仪式的，典礼的 通常的，习惯的cannibals食人肉的野蛮人 食同类之肉的动物, or—they're aliens, Keeton. What do you want from me'" "But they're not really aliens. At least not intelligent ones. War implies intelligence." "Ants wage war all the time. Proves nothing except that they're alive." "Are scramblers even alive'" I asked. "What kind of question is that'" "You think Rorschach grows them on some kind of assembly line. You can't find any genes. Maybe they're just biomechanical machines." "That's what life is, Keeton. That's what you are." Another hit of nicotine, another storm of numbers, another sample. "Life isn't either/or. It's a matter of degree." "What I'm asking is, are they natural' Could they be constructs'" "Is a termite   白蚁mound一堆；许多 土堆；小丘a construct' Beaver dam' Space ship' Of course. Were they built by naturally-evolved organisms, acting naturally' They were. So tell me how anything in the whole deep multiverse  多元宇宙 can ever be anything but natural'" I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. "You know what I mean." "It's a meaningless question. Get your head out of the Twentieth Century." I gave up. After a few seconds Cunningham seemed to notice the silence. He withdrew his consciousness from the machinery and looked around with fleshly eyes, as if searching for some mosquito that had mysteriously stopped whining. "What's your problem with me'" I asked. Stupid question, obvious question. Unworthy （常与of连用）不配的，与…不相称的 of any synthesist to be so, so direct. His eyes glittered in that dead face. "Processing without comprehension. That's what you do, isn't it'" "That's a colossal  巨大的；庞大的oversimplification." "Mmm." Cunningham nodded. "Then why can't you seem to comprehend how pointless it is to keep peeking over our shoulders and writing home to our masters'" "Someone has to keep Earth in the loop." "Seven months each way. Long loop." ---------------- "Still." "We're on our own out here, Keeton. You're on your own. The game's going to be long over before our masters even know it's started." He sucked smoke. "Or perhaps not. Perhaps you're talking to someone closer, hmm' That it' Is the Fourth Wave telling you what to do'" "There is no Fourth Wave. Not that anyone's told me, anyway." "Probably not. They'd never risk their lives out here, would they' Too dangerous even to hang back and watch from a distance. That's why they built us." "We're all self-made. Nobody forced you to get the rewire." "No, nobody forced me to get the rewire. I could have just let them cut out my brain and pack it into Heaven, couldn't I' That's the choicewe have. We can be utterly useless, or we can try and compete against the vampires and the constructs and the AIs. And perhaps youcould tell me how to do that without turning into a—an utter freak." So much in the voice. Nothing at all on the face. I said nothing. "See what I mean' No comprehension." He managed a tight smile. "So I'll answer your questions. I'll delay my own work and hold your hand because Sarasti's told us to. I guess that superior vampire mind sees some legitimate reason to indulge 使满足（常与in连用）放任；沉溺e your constant ankle-nipping, and it's in charge so I'll play along. But I'm not nearly that smart, so you'll forgive me if it all seems a bit naff." "I'm just—" "You're just doing your job. I know. But I don't like being played, Keeton. And that's what your job is." * Even back on Earth, Robert Cunningham had barely disguised his opinion of the ship's commissar. It had been obvious even to the topologically blind. I'd always had a hard time imagining the man. It wasn't just his expressionless face. Sometimes, not even the subtler things behind would show up in his topology. Perhaps he repressed them deliberately, resenting the presence of this mole among the crew. It would hardly have been the first time I'd encountered such a reaction. Everyone resented me to some extent.    程度 长度；宽度；广度Oh, they liked me well enough, or thought they did. They tolerated my intrusions, and cooperated, and gave away far more than they thought they did. But beneath Szpindel's gruff camaraderie 同志情谊；友爱, beneath James's patient explanations—there was no real respect. How could there be' These people were the bleeding edge, the incandescent白热的,白炽的,遇热发光的 apex顶点,最高点   （权力等的）顶峰 of hominid原人,原始人 人种的achievement. They were trusted with the fate of the world. I was just a tattletale 告密者, 搬弄是非的人for small minds back home. Not even that much, when home receded too deeply into the distance. Superfluous 过多的；不必要的；多余的 mass. Couldn't be helped. No use getting bothered over it. Still, Szpindel had only coined commissar half-jokingly. Cunningham believed it, and didn't laugh. And while I'd encountered many others like him over the years, those had only tried to hide themselves from sight. Cunningham was the first who seemed to succeed. I tried to build the relationship all the way through training, tried to find the missing pieces. I watched him working the simulator's teleops one day, exercising the shiny new interfaces that spread him through walls and wires. He was practicing his surgical skills on some hypothetical alien the computer had conjured up 想象；推想；回忆；忆起 to test his technique. Sensors and jointed teleops sprouted like the legs of an enormous spider crab from an overhead mount. Spirit-possessed, they dipped and weaved around some semiplausible holographic creature. Cunningham's own body merely trembled slightly, a cigarette jiggling at the corner of its mouth. I waited for him to take a break. Eventually the tension ebbed from his shoulders. His vicarious替代的；藉…而感到的 limbs relaxed. "So." I tapped my temple. "Why'd you do it'" He didn't turn. Above the dissection, 解剖, 切开 sensors swiveled and stared back like dismembered eyestalks. That was the center of Cunningham's awareness right now, not this nicotine-stained body in front of me. Those were his eyes, or his tongue, or whatever unimaginable bastard-senses he used to parse what the machines sent him. Those clusters   一串；一束；一群aimed back at me, at us—and if Robert Cunningham still possessed anything that might be called vision, he was watching himself from eyes two meters outside his own skull. "Do what, exactly'" he said at last. "The enhancements'" Enhancements. As though he'd upgraded his wardrobe衣柜；藏衣室 全部服装  全部戏装instead of ripping out his senses and grafting new ones into the wounds. I nodded. "It's vital to keep current," he said. "If you don't reconfigure 重新装配, 改装 you can't retrain. If you don’t retrain you're obsolete inside a month, and then you're not much good for anything except Heaven or dictation." I ignored the jibe.  嘲笑；嘲弄"Pretty radical transformation, though." "Not these days." "Didn't it change you'" His body dragged on the cigarette. Targeted ventilation 通风, 流通空气sucked away the smoke before it reached me. "That's the whole point." "Surely you were affected personally, though. Surely—" "Ah." He nodded; at the far end of shared motor nerves, teleops jiggled in sympathy. "Change the eyes that look at the world, change theme does the looking'" -------------- "Something like that." Now he was watching me with fleshly eyes. Across the membrane those snakes and eyestalks returned to their work on the virtual carcass, as if deciding they'd wasted enough time on pointless distractions. I wondered which body he was in now. "I'm surprised you'd have to ask," the meat one said. "Doesn't my body language tell you everything' Aren't jargonauts supposed to read minds'" He was right, of course. I wasn't interested in Cunningham's words; those were just the carrier wave. He couldn't hear the real conversation we were having. All his angles and surfaces spoke volumes, and although their voices were strangely fuzzed with feedback and distortion I knew I'd be able to understand them eventually. I only had to keep him talking. But Jukka Sarasti chose that moment to wander past and surgically trash my best-laid plans. "Siri's best in his field," he remarked. "But not when it gets too close to home." 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彩虹的,彩虹色的. 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 阀；活门；气门   电子管, or something. Maybe you have to submerge 潜入水中；沉没；淹没   潜航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 病理学的；病理上的   由疾病引起的；伴杂疾病的   不合理的；不自然的；只由于想象的. 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." "Why even try, then' If you knew we were just going to crash and burn like this'" "Oh, Cygnus. Aren't you the one who says that everyone crashes and burns eventually' Aren't you the one who says it never lasts'" Mom and Dad lasted. Longer than this, anyway. I frowned, astonished that I'd even let the thought form in my head. Chelse read the silence as a wounded one. "I guess—maybe I thought I could help, you know' Help fix whatever made you so—so angry all the time." The butterfly was starting to fade. I'd never seen that happen before. "Do you understand what I'm saying'" she asked. "Sure. I'm a fixer-upper." "Siri, you wouldn't even get a tweak when I offered. You were so scared of being manipulated you wouldn't even try a basic cascade. 瀑布；成下垂状的东西 You're the one guy I've met who might be truly, eternally unfixable. I dunno. Maybe that's even something to be proud of." I opened my mouth, and closed it. She gave me a sad smile. "Nothing, Siri' Nothing at all' There was a time you always knew exactly what to say." She looked back at some earlier version of me. "Now I wonder if you ever actually meant any of it." "That's not fair." "No." She pursed her lips. "No, it isn't. That's not really what I'm trying to say. I guess...it's not so much that you don't mean any of it. It's more like you don't know what any of it means." The color was gone from the wings. The butterfly was a delicate charcoal 木炭dusting 打扫, 殴打, almost motionless. "I'll do it now," I said. "I'll get the tweaks. If it's that important to you. I'll do it now." "It's too late, Siri. I'm used up." Maybe she wanted me to call her back. All these words ending in question marks, all these significant silences. Maybe she was giving me the opportunity to plead my case, to beg for another chance. Maybe she wanted a reason to change her mind. I could have tried. Please don't, I could have said. I'm begging you. I never meant to drive you away completely, just a little, just to a safer distance. Please. In thirty long years the only time I haven't felt worthless was when we were together. But when I looked up again the butterfly was gone and so was she, taking all baggage 行李   （军队的）行装   活泼调皮的女孩子 with her. She carried doubt, and guilt for having led me on. She left believing that our incompatibility was no one's fault, that she'd tried as hard as she could, even that I had under the tragic weight of all my issues. She left, and maybe she didn't even blame me, and I never even knew who'd made that final decision. I was good at what I did. I was so damned good, I did it without even meaning to. * "My God! Did you hear that!'" Susan James bounced around the drum like a pronking wildebeest（非洲）角马 in the half-gravity. I could see the whites of her eyes from ninety degrees away. "Check your feeds! Check your feeds! The pens!" I checked. One scrambler afloat; the other still jammed into its corner. James landed at my side with a two-footed thump, wobbling for balance. "Turn the sound up!" The hissing of the air conditioners. The clank of distant machinery echoing along the spine; Theseus' usual intestinal肠的, 肠内的, (疾病)侵袭肠的 rumblings 隆隆声   怨言. Nothing else. "Okay, they're not doing it now." James brought up a splitscreen window and threw it into reverse. "There," she pronounced, replaying the record with the audio cranked and filtered. In the right side of the window, the floating scrambler had drifted so that the tip of one outstretched arm brushed against the wall that adjoined the other pen. In the left side, the huddled scrambler remained unmoving. I thought I heard something. Just for an instant: the brief buzz of an insect, perhaps, if the nearest insect hadn't been five trillion kilometers away. "Replay that. Slow it down." ------------- A buzz, definitely. A vibration. "Way down." A click train, squirted from a dolphin's forehead. Farting lips. "No, let me." James bulled into Cunningham's headspace and yanked the slider to the left. Tick tick...tick...tick tick tick...tick...tick tick tick... Dopplered [宗]深浸派down near absolute zero, it went on for almost a minute. Total elapsed real time was about half a second. Cunningham zoomed the splitscreen. The huddled（常与up连用）挤作一团,缩成一堆 scrambler had remained motionless, except for the rippling of its cuticle  硬表皮；外皮 and the undulation  波动，起伏   波状起伏of its free arms. But before I'd only seen eight arms—and now I could make out the bony spur 马刺，靴刺   激励；策动力； 鼓励of a ninth peeking from behind the central mass. A ninth arm, curled up and hidden from view, tick tick ticking while another creature casually leaned against the other side of the wall... Now, there was nothing. The floating scrambler had drifted aimlessly back to the center of its enclosure. James's eyes shone. "We've got to check the rest of—" But Theseus had been watching, and was way ahead of us. It had already searched the archives and served up the results: three similar exchanges over two days, ranging in duration from a tenth of a second to almost two. "They're talking," James said. Cunningham shrugged, a forgotten cigarette burning down between his fingers. "So do a lot of things. And at that rate of exchange they're not exactly doing calculus. You could get as much information out of a dancing honeybee." "That's nonsense and you know it, Robert." "What I know is that—" "Honeybees don't deliberately hide what they're saying. Honeybees don't develop whole new modes of communication configured specifically to confound observers. That's flexible, Robert. That's intelligent." "And what if it is, hmm' Forget for a moment the inconvenient fact that these things don't even have brains. I really don't think you've thought this through." "Of course I have." "Indeed' Then what are you so happy about' Don't you know what this means'" Sudden prickling  使感到疼痛on the back of my neck. I looked around; I looked up. Jukka Sarasti had appeared in the center of the drum, eyes gleaming 闪烁；发微光, teeth bared, watching us. Cunningham followed my gaze, and nodded. "I'd wager it does..." * There was no way to learn what they'd whispered across that wall. We could recover the audio easily enough, parse 从语法上分析；解释词在句中的用法every tick表示正确所标的记号（通常作√） and tap they'd exchanged, but you can't decipher a code without some idea of content. We had patterns of sound that could have meant anything. We had creatures whose grammar and syntax—if their mode of communication even contained such attributes—were unknown and perhaps unknowable. We had creatures smart enough to talk, and smart enough to hide that fact. No matter how much we wanted to learn, they were obviously unwilling to teach us. Not without—how had I put it'— negative reinforcement. It was Jukka Sarasti who made the decision. We did it on his orders, as we did everything else. But after the word had come down— after Sarasti had disappeared in the night and Bates had retreated down the spine and Robert Cunningham had returned to his studies at the back of the drum—I was the one Susan James was left with. The first to speak the vile thought aloud, the official witness to posterity后代；后裔   子孙. I was the one she looked at, and looked away from, her surfaces hard and refractory.不听话的；难驾驭的   耐熔的；耐火的 ------------ And then she started. * This is how you break down the wall: Start with two beings. They can be human if you like, but that's hardly a prerequisite. All that matters is that they know how to talk among themselves. Separate them. Let them see each other, let them speak. Perhaps a window between their cages. Perhaps an audio feed 给吃，喂. Let them practice the art of conversation in their own chosen way. Hurt them. It may take a while to figure out how. Some may shrink from fire, others from toxic gas or liquid. Some creatures may be invulnerable to blowtorches a portable device producing a hot flame that is directed onto a surface, typically to solder metal.and grenades 手榴弹, but shriek   尖叫声in terror at the threat of ultrasonic sound. You have to experiment; and when you discover just the right stimulus, the optimum balance between pain and injury, you must inflict it without the remorse.后悔；悔恨 You leave them an escape hatch, of course. That's the very point of the exercise: give one of your subjects the means to end the pain, but give the other the information required to use it. To one you might present a single shape, while showing the other a whole selection. The pain will stop when the being with the menu chooses the item its partner has seen. So let the games begin. Watch your subjects squirm. If—when—they trip the off switch, you'll know at least some of the information they exchanged; and if you record everything that passed between them, you'll start to get some idea of how they exchanged it. When they solve one puzzle, give them a new one. Mix things up. Switch their roles. See how they do at circles versus squares. Try them out on factorials 〈数〉阶乘，析因and Fibonnaccis. Continue until Rosetta Stone results. This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, and keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams. Susan James—congenital optimist, high priestess （基督教会以外的）女神职人员 of the Church of the Healing Word, was best qualified to design and execute the protocols. Now, at her command, the scramblers writhed. They pulled themselves around their cages in elliptical椭圆形的, 省略的 loops, desperately seeking any small corner free of stimulus. James had piped the feed into ConSensus, although there was no mission-critical reason forTheseus' whole crew to bear witness to the interrogation.  讯问；审问；质问 "Let them block it at their ends," she said quietly, "If they want to." For all his reluctance 不情愿；勉强 to accept that these were beings, intelligent and aware, Cunningham had named the prisoners. Stretch tended to float spread-eagled; Clench was the balled-up corner-hugger. Susan, playing her own part in this perverse role-reversal反转，倒转，逆转   倒退, had simply numbered them One and Two. It wasn't that Cunningham's choices were too cheesy for her to stomach, or that she objected to slave names on principle. She'd just fallen back on the oldest trick in the Torturer's Handbook, the one that lets you go home to your family after work, and play with your children, and sleep at night: never humanize your victims. It shouldn't have been such an issue when dealing with methane-breathing medusa〈动〉水母e. I guess every little bit helped. Biotelemetry danced across the headspace  [化]顶部空间   [军]顶端空间 beside each alien, luminous annotations shuddering through thin air. I had no idea what constituted normal readings for these creatures, but I couldn't imagine those jagged spikes passing for anything but bad news. The creatures themselves seethed subtly with fine mosaics in blue and gray, fluid patterns rippling across their cuticles. Perhaps it was a reflexive reaction to the microwaves; for all we knew it was a mating display. More likely they were screaming. James killed the microwaves. In the left-hand enclosure, a yellow square dimmed; in the right, an identical icon nested among others had never lit. ------------- The pigment flowed faster in the wake of the onslaught 冲击；猛攻; the arms slowed but didn't stop. They swept back and forth like listless, skeletal 骨骼的, 骸骨的 eels. "Baseline exposure. Five seconds, two hundred fifty Watts." She spoke for the record. Another affectation; Theseus recorded every breath on board, every trickle of current to five decimal places. "Repeat." The icon lit up. More tile patterns, flash-flooding across alien skin. But this time, neither alien moved from where it was. Their arms continued to squirm slightly, a torqued trembling variation on the undulation  波动，起伏   波状起伏they effected at rest. The telemetry was as harsh as ever, though. They learned helplessness fast enough, I reflected. I glanced at Susan. "Are you going to do this all yourself'" Her eyes were bright and wet as she killed the current. Clench's icon dimmed. Stretch's remained dormant. I cleared my throat. "I mean—" "Who else is going to do this, Siri' Jukka' You'" "The rest of the Gang. Sascha could—" "Sascha'" She stared at me. "Siri, I created them. Do you think I did that so I could hide behind them when—so I could force them to do things like this'" She shook her head. "I'm not bringing them out. Not for this. I wouldn't do that to my worst enemy." She turned away from me. There were drugs she could have taken, neuro inhibitors   [化]抑制剂, 抑制者to wash away the guilt, short-circuit it right down in the molecules. Sarasti had offered them up as if he were tempting some solitary 单独的；孤独的   喜欢独处的，惯于独居的   偏僻的； 孤寂的messiah  弥赛亚（犹太人所期待的救世主）   救世主in the desert. James had refused him, and would not say why. "Repeat," she said. The current flickered on, then off. "Repeat," she said again. Not a twitch. I pointed. "I see it," she said. Clench had pressed the tip of one arm against the touchpad. The icon there glowed like a candle flame. * Six and a half minutes later they'd graduated from yellow squares to time-lapsed four-dimensional polyhedrons  多面体. It took them as long to distinguish between two twenty-six-faceted shifting solids—differing by one facet in a single frame—as it took them to tell the difference between a yellow square and a red triangle. Intricate   复杂的；难懂的patterns played across their surfaces the whole time, dynamic needlepoint mosaics flickering almost too fast to see. "Fuck," James whispered. "Could be splinter skills." Cunningham had joined us in ConSensus, although his body remained halfway around BioMed. "Splinter skills," she repeated dully. "Savantism. Hyper performance at one kind of calculation doesn't necessarily connote（词汇等）暗示，意味着，含蓄 high intelligence." "I know what splinter  尖片；裂片； 碎片；刺 skills are, Robert. I just think you're wrong." "Prove it." So she gave up on geometry and told the scramblers that one plus one equaled two. Evidently they knew that already: ten minutes later they were predicting ten-digit prime numbers on demand. She showed them a sequence of two-dimensional shapes; they picked the next one in the series from a menu of subtly-different alternatives. She denied them multiple choice, showed them the beginning of a whole new sequence and taught them to draw on the touch-sensitive interface with the tips of their arms. They finished that series in precise freehand 徒手地，不用绘图仪器地 徒手画的，不用绘图仪器的, rendered a chain of logical descendants ending with ---------------- a figure that led inexorably   无情地, 冷酷地back to the starting point. "These aren't drones." James's voice caught in her throat. "This is all just crunching,嘎吱嘎吱地嚼，啃" Cunningham said. "Millions of computer programs do it without ever waking up." "They're intelligent, Robert. They're smarter than us. Maybe they're smarter than Jukka. And we're—why can't you just admit it'" I could see it all over her: Isaac would have admitted it. "Because they don't have the circuitry 电路，电路系统   电路元件   电路学," Cunningham insisted. "How could—" "I don't know how!" she cried. "That's your job! All I know is that I'm torturing beings that can think rings around us..." "Not for much longer, at least. Once you figure out the language—" She shook her head. "Robert, I haven't a clue about the language. We've been at it for—for hours, haven't we' The Gang's all here, language databases four thousand years thick, all the latest linguistic algorithms. And we know exactly what they're saying, we're watching every possible way they could be saying it. Right down to the Angstrom." "Precisely. So—" "I've got nothing. I know they're talking through pigment mosaics. There might even be something in the way they move those bristles. 短而硬的毛 But I can't find the pattern, I can't even follow how they count, much less tell them I'm...sorry..." Nobody spoke for a while. Bates watched us from the galley on our ceiling, but made no attempt to join the proceedings.  进程 (pl) 事件；事项 (pl) 诉讼程序 (pl) 记录On ConSensus the reprieved 缓期执行；暂缓处刑 scramblers floated in their cages like multiarmed martyrs.烈士；殉道 者；殉教者   （与to连用）作某种牺牲来博得声誉的人 "Well," Cunningham said at last, "since this seems to be the day for bad news, here's mine. They're dying." James put her face in her hand. "It's not your interrogation, for whatever that's worth," the biologist continued. "As far as I can determine, some of their metabolic pathways are just missing." "Obviously you just haven't found them yet." That was Bates, speaking up from across the drum. "No," Cunningham said, slowly and distinctly, "obviously those parts aren't available to the organism. Because they're falling apart pretty much the same way you'd expect one of us to, if—if all the mitotic 有丝分裂的, 间接核分裂的 spindles in our cells just vanished out of the cytoplasm, for example. As far as I can tell they started deteriorating  使恶化；变糟the moment we took them off Rorschach." Susan looked up. "Are you saying they left part of their biochemistry behind'" "Some essential nutrient'" Bates suggested. "They're not eating—" "Yes to the linguist. No to the major." Cunningham fell silent; I glanced across the drum to see him sucking on a cigarette. "I think a lot of the cellular processes in these things are mediated externally. I think the reason I can't find any genes in my biopsies is because they don'thave any." "So what do they have instead'" Bates asked. "Turing morphogens [生]成形素." Blank looks, subtitling looks. Cunningham explained anyway: "A lot of biology doesn't use genes. Sunflowers look the way they do because of purely physical buckling stress. You get Fibonacci sequences and Golden ratios everywhere in nature, and there's no gene that codes for them; it's all just mechanical interactions. Take a developing embryo—the genes say start growing or stop growing, but the number of digits and vertebrae [解]椎骨result from the mechanics of cells bumping against other cells. Those mitotic spindles I mentioned' Absolutely essential for replication in every eukaryotic  〈生〉真核细胞 cell, and they accrete like crystals without any genetic involvement. You'd be surprised how much of life is like that." "But you still need genes," Bates protested, walking around to join us. "Genes just establish the starting conditions to enable the process. The structure that proliferates --------------- afterwards doesn't need specific instructions. It's classic emergent complexity. We've known about it for over a century." Another drag on the stick. "Or even longer. Darwin cited honeycomb way back in the eighteen hundreds." "Honeycomb," Bates repeated. "Perfect hexagonal tubes in a packed array. Bees are hardwired to lay them down, but how does an insect know enough geometry to lay down a precise hexagon' It doesn't. It's programmed to chew up wax and spit it out while turning on its axis, and that generates a circle. Put a bunch of bees on the same surface, chewing side-by-side, and the circles abut against each other—deform  使残废；使…外形破坏；损毁…表面 each other into hexagons, which just happen to be more efficient for close packing anyway." Bates pounced（常与on, upon连用）（猛禽等）突然扑过去攫住（常与on, upon连用）突然袭击 : "But the bees are programmed. Genetically." "You misunderstand. Scramblers are the honeycomb." "Rorschach is the bees," James murmured. Cunningham nodded. "Rorschach is the bees. And I don't think Rorschach's magnetic fields are counterintrusion mechanisms at all. I think they're part of the life-support system. I think they mediate and regulate a good chunk of scrambler metabolism. What we've got back in the hold is a couple of creatures dragged out of their element and holding their breath. And they can't hold it forever." "How long'" James asked. "How should I know' If I'm right, I'm not even dealing with complete organisms here." "Guess," Bates said. He shrugged. "A few days. Maybe." "That which does not kill us, makes us stranger." —Trevor Goodchild "You still don't vote," Sarasti said. We would not be releasing the prisoners. Too risky. Out here in the endless wastelands of the Oort there was no room for live and let live. Never mind what the Other has done, or what it hasn't: think of what it could do, if it were just a little stronger. Think of what it mighthave done, if we'd arrived as late as we were supposed to. You look at Rorschach and perhaps you see an embryo or a developing child, alien beyond comprehension perhaps but not guilty, not by default. But what if those are the wrong eyes' What if you should be seeing an omnipotent  无所不能的，全能的 murdering God, a planet-killer, not yet finished' Vulnerable only now, and for a little longer' There was no vampire opacity 不透明，不透光 to that logic, no multidimensional black boxes for humans to shrug at and throw up their hands. There was no excuse for the failure to find fault with Sarasti's reasoning, beyond the fact that his reasoning was without fault. That made it worse. The others, I knew, would rather have had to take something on faith. But Sarasti had an alternative to capture-release, one he evidently considered much safer. It took an act of faith to accept that reasoning, at least; by any sane measure it verged（与on, upon连用）将近，接近 on suicide. Now Theseus gave birth by Caesarian. These progeny were far too massive to fit through the canal 运河；沟渠  （人体内的）管道at the end of the spine. The ship shat them as if constipated, 使便秘；秘结 directly into the hold: great monstrous things, bristling with  充满 muzzles and antennae. Each stood three or four times my height, a pair of massive rust-colored cubes, every surface infested with topography  地形学   地形；地势. Armor  装甲   装甲车   （动植物的）防护器官plating would hide most of it prior to deployment, of course. Ribbons of piping and conduit, ammunition 军火;弹药 reservoirs  蓄水池；水库  （知识、资料的）贮藏；蓄积 and shark-toothed rows of radiator fins— all to disappear beneath smooth reflective shielding. Only a few island landmarks would rise above that surface: comm ports, thrust nozzles,  喷嘴；管嘴 targeting arrays. And gun ports, of course. These things spat fire and brimstone  硫磺烈火 from a half-dozen mouths apiece. But for the time being they were just giant mechanical fetuses  胎，胎儿, half-extruded与from连用）挤出   模压；挤压, their planes and angles a ------------------ high-contrast jigsaw of light and shadow in the harsh white glow of the hold's floodlamps. I turned from the port. "That's got to take our substrate stockpiles down a bit." "Shielding the carapace was worse." Bates monitored construction through a dedicated flatscreen built right into the Fab bulkhead. Practicing, perhaps; we'd be losing our inlays as soon as the orbit changed. "We're tapping out, though. Might have to grab one of the local rocks before long." "Huh." I looked back into the hold. "You think they're necessary'" "Doesn't matter what I think. You're a bright guy, Siri. Why can't you figure that out'" "It matters to me. That means it matters to Earth." Which might mean something, if Earth was calling the shots. Some subtext was legible no matter how deep in the system you were. I tacked to port: "How about Sarasti and the Captain, then' Any thoughts'" "You're usually a bit more subtle." That much was true. "It's just, you know Susan was the one that caught Stretch and Clench tapping back and forth, right'" Bates winced at the names. "So'" "Well, some might think it odd that Theseus wouldn't have seen it first. Since quantum computers are supposed to be so proficient（常与in, at连用）熟练的；精通的 at pattern-matching." "Sarasti took the quantum modules offline. The onboard's been running in classical mode since before we even made orbit." "Why'" "Noisy environment. Too much risk of decoherence  [电]脱散. Quantum computers are finicky 苛求的；过分挑剔的 things." "Surely the onboard's shielded. Theseus is shielded." Bates nodded. "As much as feasible. 可行的；行得通的 But perfect shielding is perfect blindness, and this is not the kind of neighborhood where you want to keep your eyes closed." Actually, it was. But I took her point. I took her other point, too, the one she didn't speak aloud: And you missed it. Something sitting right there in ConSensus for anyone to see. Top-of-the-line synthesist like you. "Sarasti knows what he's doing, I guess," I admitted, endlessly aware that he might be listening. "He hasn't been wrong yet, as far as we know." "As far as we can know," Bates said. "If you could second-guess a vampire, you wouldn't need a vampire," I remembered. She smiled faintly. "Isaac was a good man. You can't always believe the PR, though." "You don't buy it'" I asked, but she was already thinking she'd said too much. I threw out a hook baited with just the right mix of skepticism and deference: "Sarasti did know where those scramblers would be. Nailed it almost the meter, out of that whole maze." "I suppose that might have taken some kind of superhuman超人的 logic," she admitted, thinking I was so fucking dumb she couldn't believe it. "What'" I said. Bates shrugged. "Or maybe he just realized that since Rorschach was growing its own crew, we'd run into more every time we went in. No matter where we landed." ConSensus bleeped 发出嘟嘟声（或哔哔声） into my silence. "Orbital maneuvers starting in five," Sarasti announced. "Inlays and wireless prosthetics offline in ninety. That's all." Bates shut down the display. "I'm going to ride this out in the bridge. Illusion of control and all that. You'" "My tent, I think." She nodded, and braced to jump, and hesitated. "By the way," she told me, "yes." "Sorry'" "You asked if I thought the emplacements were necessary. Right now I think we need all the protection ----------------- we can get." "So you think that Rorschach might—" "Hey, it already killed me once. " She wasn't talking about radiation. I nodded carefully. "That must have been…" "Like nothing at all. You couldn't possibly imagine." Bates took a breath and let it out. "Maybe you don't have to," she added, and sailed away up the spine. * Cunningham and the Gang in BioMed, thirty degrees of arc between them. Each poked their captives in their own way. Susan James stabbed indifferently at a keypad painted across her desktop. Windows to either side looked in on Stretch and Clench. Cookie-cutter shapes scrolled across the desk as James typed: circles, triskelions(从中心点辐射的) 三曲枝图三曲腿图  三曲臂图, a quartet of parallel lines. Some of them pulsed like abstract little hearts. In his distant pen, Stretch reached out one fraying  擦；磨，磨损  使烦恼；扰乱tentacle （动物的）触角，触须，触手and tapped something in turn. "Any progress'" She sighed and shook her head. "I've given up trying to understand their language. I'm settling for a pidgin  不纯粹的语言；混杂语言." She tapped an icon. Clench vanished from his window; a hieroglyphic 象形文字  象形文字的 flowchart sprang up 跳起来 in his place. Half the symbols wriggled 扭来扭去；蠕动 （与along, through连用）蜿蜒爬行 or pulsed, endlessly repetitive, a riot of dancing doodles  乱写； 乱画；涂鸦. Others just sat there. "Iconic base." James waved vaguely at the display. "Subject-Verb phrases render as animated versions of noun icons. They're radially symmetrical, so I array modifiers in a circular pattern around the central subject. Maybe that comes naturally to them." A new circle of glyphs[建]纵的沟纹, 竖沟[考古]浮雕, 象形文字 [计]字形, 字的轮廓 appeared beneath James's—Stretch's reply, presumably. But something in the system didn't like what it saw. Icons flared in a separate window: a luminous counter flashed 500 Watts, and held steady. On the screen, Stretch writhed. It reached out with squirming backbone-arms and stabbed repeatedly at its touchpad. James looked away. New glyphs appeared. 500 Watts retreated to zero. Stretch returned to its holding pattern; the spikes and jags of its telemetry smoothed. James let out her breath. "What happened'" I asked. "Wrong answer." She tapped into Stretch's feed, showed me the display that had tripped it up. A pyramid, a star, simplified representations of a scrambler and of Rorschach rotated on the board. "It was stupid, it was just a—a warm-up exercise, really. I asked it to name the objects in the window." She laughed softly and without humor. "That's the thing about functional languages, you know. If you can't point at it, you can't talk about it." "And what did it say'" She pointed at Stretch's first spiral: "Polyhedron star Rorschach are present." "It missed the scrambler." "Got it right the second time. Still, stupid mistake for something that can think rings around a vampire, isn't it'" Susan swallowed. "I guess even scramblers slip up when they're dying." I didn't know what to say. Behind me, barely audible, Cunningham muttered some two-stroke mantra〈佛教、印度教〉曼特罗，咒语 to himself in an endless loop. "Jukka says—" Susan stopped, began again: "You know that blindsight we get sometimes, in Rorschach'" I nodded, and wondered what Jukka had said. "Apparently the same thing can happen to the other senses too," she told me. "You can have blindtouch, and blindsmell, and blindhearing..." ---------------------- "That would be deafness." She shook her head. "But it isn't really, is it' Any more than blindsight is really blindness. Something in your head is still taking it all in. Something in the brain is still seeing, and hearing, even if you're not—aware of it. Unless someone forces you to guess, or there's some threat. You just get a really strong feeling you should move out of the way, and five seconds later a bus drives over the spot you were standing. You knew it was coming, somehow. You just don't know how you knew." "It's wild," I agreed. "These scramblers—they know the answers, Siri. They're intelligent, we know they are. But it's almost as though they don't know they know, unless you hurt them. As if they've got blindsight spread over every sense." I tried to imagine it: life without sensation, without any active awareness of one's environment. I tried to imagine existing like that without going mad. "Do you think that's possible'" "I don't know. It's just a—a metaphor, I guess." She didn't believe that. Or she didn't know. Or she didn't want me to know. I should have been able to tell. She should have been clear. "At first I just thought they were resisting," she said, "but why would they'" She turned bright, begging eyes on me, pleading for an answer. I didn't have one. I didn't have a clue. I turned away from Susan James, only to find myself facing Robert Cunningham: Cunningham the mutterer, fingers tapping against tabletop interfaces, inner eyes blinded, vision limited now to the pictures ConSensus sketched in airspace 领空or threw against flat surfaces for everyone to see. His face remained as empty of feeling as it had ever been; the rest of his body twitched like a bug in a spiderweb. He might as well have been. We all might. Rorschach loomed barely nine kilometers away now, so near it might have eclipsed Ben itself if I'd been brave enough to look outside. We had closed to this insane proximity and parked. Out there, Rorschach grew like a live thing.In there, live things grew, budded like jellyfish from some demonic mechanical substrate. Those lethal, vacant corridors we'd crept along, frightened of the shadows planted in our heads—they were probably filling with scramblers right now. All those hundreds of kilometers of twisted tunnels and passages and chambers. Filling with an army. This was Sarasti's safer alternative. This was the path we'd followed because it would have been too dangerous to release the prisoners. We were so deep inside the bow shock that we'd had to shut down our internal augments; while Rorschach's magnetosphere was orders of magnitude weaker here than within the structure itself, who knew if the alien might find us too tempting a target—or too great a threat—at this range' Who knew when it might choose to plunge some invisible spike through Theseus's heart' Any pulse that could penetrate the ship's shielding would doubtless fry Theseus's nervous system as well as the wiring in our heads. I supposed that five people in a dead ship would have a marginally在边上 greater chance of survival if their brains weren't sparking in the bargain, but I doubted that such a difference would make much difference. Sarasti had obviously figured the odds differently. He'd even shut down the antiEuclidean pump in his own head, resorted to manual injections  注射；打针 注射剂；针药 to keep himself from short-circuiting. Stretch and Clench were even closer to Rorschach than we were. Cunningham's lab had been kicked free of the ship; it floated now just a few kilometers from the artefact's outermost spires  塔顶；尖顶, deep within the folds of its magnetic field. If the scramblers needed radioactive magnetite to function, this was the most they were going to get: a taste of the fields, but not of freedom. The lab's shielding was being dynamically fine-tuned to balance medical necessity against tactical risk, as best the data allowed. The structure floated in the watchful crosshairs of our newborn gun emplacements,放置，安插 炮位；炮兵阵地 strategically positioned to either side. Those emplacements could destroy the hab in an instant. They could probably destroy anything approaching it as well. -------------- They couldn't destroy Rorschach, of course. Maybe nothing could. Covert to invulnerable. As far as we knew that hadn't happened yet. Presumably Theseus could still do something about the artefact accreting off our bow, assuming we could decide which thing to do. Sarasti wasn't talking. In fact, I couldn't remember the last time any of us had even seen the vampire in the flesh. For several shifts now he had confined himself to his tent, speaking only through ConSensus. Everyone was on edge, and the transient had gone quiet. Cunningham muttered to himself, stabbed at unfamiliar controls with unpracticed 练习不足的, 不熟练的 fingers, cursed his own clumsiness. Stimulus and response flowed through lasers across six kilometers of ionized vacuum. The ever-present nicotine stick hung from one corner of his mouth for want of a free hand. Every now and then flecks of ash broke free and drifted obliquely  斜的，歪斜的  间接的；不直截了当的towards the ventilators. He spoke before I could. "It's all in ConSensus." When I didn't leave he relented, but wouldn't look at me: "Magnetite磁铁矿 flecks斑点，斑纹  微粒 lined up as soon as they got past the wavefront, more or less. Membranes started to fix themselves. They're not failing as fast. But it's Rorschach'sinternal environment that will be optimized for scrambler metabolism. Out here, I think the most we can do is slow the rate of dying." "That's something, at least." Cunningham grunted. "Some of the pieces are coming together. Others—their nerves are frayed, for no good reason. Literally. Signal leakage along the cables." "Because of their deterioration'" I guessed. "And I can't get the Arrhenius equation to balance, there's all this nonlinearity非线性的 at low temperatures. The preexponential value's completely fucked up. It's almost as though temperature doesn't matter, and —shit—" Some critical value had exceeded a confidence limit on one of his displays. He glanced up the drum, raised his voice: "Need another biopsy  活组织检查, Susan. Anywhere central." "What—oh. Just a second." She shook her head and tapped off a brief spiral of icons, as listless as the captives she commanded. On one of Cunningham's windows Stretch viewed her input with its marvelous sighted skin. It floated unresponsive无反应的  没有回答的 for a moment. Then it folded back the arms facing one wall, opening a clear path for Cunningham's teleops. He called two of them from their burrows（兔等动物的）穴，窟，地洞 like prehensile （动物的尾、足等）能抓住的，能握住的，能缠住的serpents大蛇 阴险毒辣的人；诱使别人做坏事的人. The first wielded 支配；掌握a clinical core-sampler; the second wielded the threat of violence in case of foolish resistance. It was hardly necessary. Blindsighted or not, scramblers were fast learners. Stretch exposed its belly like a victim resigned to imminent rape. Cunningham fumbled摸索；搜寻失球；接错球; the teleops bumped together, briefly entangled 缠住. He cursed and tried again, every move shouting frustration. His extended phenotype 显型 had been amputated切除；截断; once the very ghost in the machine, now he was just another guy punching buttons, and— —and suddenly, something clicked. Cunningham's facades swirled to translucency半透明,半透明物 before my eyes. Suddenly, I could almost imaginehim. He got it right the second time. The tip of his machine shot out like a striking snake and darted back again, almost too fast to see. Waves of color flushed from Stretch's injury like ripples chased across still water by a falling stone. Cunningham must have thought he saw something in my face. "It helps if you try not to think of them as people," he said. And for the very first time I could read the subtext 潜在的意思，潜台词, as clear and sharp as broken glass: Of course, you don't think of anyone that way... * Cunningham didn't like to be played. No one does. But most people don't think that's what I'm doing. They don't know how much their bodies betray when they close their mouths. When they speak aloud, it's because they want to confide; when they don't, they think they're keeping their opinions to themselves. I watch them so closely, ---------------- customize each word so that no system ever feels used— and yet for some reason, that didn't work with Robert Cunningham. I think I was modeling the wrong system. Imagine you are a synthesist. You deal in the behavior of systems at their surfaces, infer the machinery beneath from its reflections above. That is the secret of your success: you understand the system by understanding the boundaries that contain it. Now imagine you encounter someone who has ripped a hole in those boundaries and bled beyond them. Robert Cunningham's flesh could not contain him. His duties pulled him beyond the meat sack袋子；大包（前面与the连用）开除，解雇; here in the Oort, his topology rambled 漫步；散步 漫谈；写随笔 all over the ship. That was true of all of us, to some extent; Bates and her drones, Sarasti and his limbic link—even the ConSensus inlays in our heads diffused   漫射；散播；扩散；传开us a bit, spread us just slightly beyond the confines of our own bodies. But Bates only ran her drones; she neverinhabited them. The Gang of Four may have run multiple systems on a single motherboard底板, 母板, but each had its own distinct topology and they only surfaced one at a time. And Sarasti— Well, Sarasti was a whole different story, as it turned out. Cunningham didn't just operate his remotes; he escaped into them, wore them like a secret identity to hide the feeble Human baseline within. He had sacrificed half of his neocortex  [解]新(大脑) 皮层for the chance to see x-rays and taste the shapes hiding in cell membranes, he had butchered屠宰   残杀；滥杀 one body to become a fleeting tenant   佃户；房客of many. Pieces of him hid in the sensors and manipulators that lined the scrambler's cages; I might have gleaned vital cues from every piece of equipment in the subdrum if I'd ever thought to look. Cunningham was a topological jigsaw  钢丝锯  拼板玩具 like everyone else, but half his pieces were hidden in machinery. My model was incomplete. I don't think he ever aspired to such a state. Looking back, I see radiant self-loathing非常讨厌；厌恶 on every remembered surface. But there in the waning  减少；衰落；缺损 years of the twenty-first century, the only alternative he could see was the life of a parasite. Cunningham merely chose the lesser evil. Now, even that was denied him. Sarasti's orders had severed him from his own sensorium感觉中枢, 感觉器官. He no longer felt the data in his gut; he had to interpret it, step by laborious 勤劳的 辛苦的；费力的step, through screens and graphs that reduced perception to flat empty shorthand. Here was a system traumatized by multiple amputations切断手术. Here was a system with its eyes and ears and tongue cut out, forced to stumble and feel its way around things it had once inhabited, right down in the bone. Suddenly there was nowhere else to hide, and all those far-flung pieces of Robert Cunningham tumbled back into his flesh where I could see them at last. It had been my mistake, all along. I'd been so focused on modelling other systems that I'd forgotten about the one doing the modelling. Bad eyes are only one bane of clear vision: bad assumptions can be just as blinding, and it wasn't enough to imagine I was Robert Cunningham. I had to imagine I was Siri Keeton as well. * Of course, that only raises another question. If my guess about Cunningham was right, why did my tricks work on Isaac Szpindel' He was every bit as discontinuous 中断的； 不连贯的；断续的；跳跃式的 as his replacement. I didn't think about it much at the time. Szpindel was gone but the thing that had killed him was still there, hanging right off the bow, a vast swelling enigma 费解的事，神秘的人  谜，谜一样的话 that might choose to squash  压扁，挤扁；压烂 挤进，挤入 使之缄默；镇压；平息us at any instant. I was more than a little preoccupied. 使出神；使全神贯注 Now, though—far too late to do anything about it—I think I might know the answer. Maybe my tricks didn't work on Isaac either, not really. Maybe he saw through my manipulations as easily as Cunningham did. But maybe he just didn't care. Maybe I could read him because he let me. Which would mean— I can't find another explanation that fits— that he just liked me, regardless. I think that might have made him a friend. ----------------- "If I can but make the words awake the feeling" —Ian Anderson, Stand Up Night shift. Not a creature was stirring. Not in Theseus, anyway. The Gang hid in their tent. The transient lurked weightless and silent below the surface. Bates was in the bridge­— she more or less lived up there now, vigilant  守夜的，不睡的  时刻警惕着的and conscientious凭良心的；谨慎的；尽责的, nested in camera angles and tactical overlays. There was nowhere she could turn without seeing some aspect of the cipher off our starboard bow. She did what good she could, for the good it would do. The drum turned quietly, lights dimmed in deference to a diel cycle that a hundred years of tweaks and retrofits式样翻新, 花样翻新 hadn't been able to weed from the genes. I sat alone in the galley, squinting  眯着眼看  斜视from the inside of a system whose outlines grew increasingly hazy, trying to compile my latest—how had Isaac put it'— postcard to posterity 后代；后裔. Cunningham worked upside-down on the other side of the world. Except Cunningham wasn't working. He hadn't even moved for at least four minutes. I'd assumed he was reciting the Kaddish for Szpindel—ConSensus said he'd be doing it twice daily for the next year, if we lived that long—but now, leaning to see around the spinal bundles in the core, I could read his surfaces as clearly as if I'd been sitting beside him. He wasn't bored, or distracted, or even deep in thought. Robert Cunningham was petrified.吓呆；使发呆使石化；使化为石 I stood and paced the drum. Ceiling turned into wall; wall into floor. I was close enough to hear his incessant soft muttering低声说出 （生气或抱怨的话）, a single indistinct syllable repeated over and over; then I was close enough to hear what he was saying— "fuck fuck fuck fuck..." —and still Cunningham didn't move, although I'd made no attempt to mask my approach. Finally, when I was almost at his shoulder, he fell silent. "You're blind," he said without turning. "Did you know that'" "I didn't." "You. Me. Everyone." He interlocked his fingers and clenched as if in prayer, hard enough to whiten the knuckles. Only then did I notice: no cigarette. "Vision's mostly a lie anyway," he continued. "We don't really see anything except a few hi-res degrees where the eye focuses. Everything else is just peripheral blur, just— light and motion. Motion draws the focus. And your eyes jiggle all the time, did you know that, Keeton' Saccades, they're called. Blurs the image, the movement's way too fast for the brain to integrate so your eye just—shuts down between pauses. It only grabs these isolated freeze-frames, but your brain edits out the blanks and stitches an — an illusion of continuity into your head." He turned to face me. "And you know what's really amazing' If something only moves during the gaps, your brain just—ignores it. It's invisible." I glanced at his workspace. The usual splitscreen glowed to one side—realtime images of the scramblers in their pens—but Histology, ten thousand times larger than life, took center stage. The paradoxical荒谬的 neural architecture of Stretch & Clench glistened on the main window, flensed 剥取脂肪, 剥皮 and labeled and overlaid  覆盖 by circuit diagrams a dozen layers thick. A dense, annotated注解 forest of alien trunks and brambles荆棘；有刺灌木；野生黑莓. It looked a little like Rorschach itself. I couldn't parse 从语法上分析；解释词在句中的用法 any of it. "Are you listening, Keeton' Do you know what I'm saying'" "You've figured out why I couldn't—you're saying these things can somehow tell when our eyes are offline, and..." I didn't finish. It just didn't seem possible. Cunningham shook his head. Something that sounded disturbingly like a giggle escaped his mouth. "I'm saying these things can see your nerves firing from across the room, and integrate that into a crypsis strategy, and then send motor commands to act on that strategy, and then send other commands -------------- to stop the motion before your eyes come back online. All in the time it would take a mammalian nerve impulse to make it halfway from your shoulder to your elbow. These things are fast, Keeton. Way faster than we could have guessed even from that high-speed whisper line they were using. They're bloody superconductors." It took a conscious effort to keep from frowning. "Is that even possible'" "Every nerve impulse generates an electromagnetic field. That makes it detectable可发觉的, 可看穿的." "But Rorschach's EM fields are so—I mean, reading the firing of a single optic nerve through all that interference—" "It's not interference. The fields are part of them, remember' That's probably how they do it." "So they couldn't do that here." "You're not listening. The trap you set wouldn't have caught anything like that, not unless it wanted to be caught. We didn't grab specimens at all. We grabbed spies." Stretch and Clench floated in splitscreen before us, arms swaying like undulating使波动；使起伏 backbones 脊柱，脊骨. Cryptic patterns played slowly across their cuticles.硬表皮；外皮 "Supposing it's just— instinct," I suggested. "Flounders hide against their background pretty well, but they don't think about it." "Where are they going to get that instinct from, Keeton' How is it going to evolve' Saccades 急速勒马, 眼睛飞快扫视 are an accidental glitch in mammalian vision. Where would scramblers have encountered them before now'" Cunningham shook his head. "That thing, that thing Amanda's robot fried— it developed that strategy on its own, on the spot. It improvised." The word intelligent barely encompassed 包括，包含 完工，促使that kind of improvisation即席创作. But there was something else in Cunningham's face, some deeper distress  巨大的痛苦；悲伤；贫困；伤痛；忧伤   危险；困境nested inside what he'd already told me. "What'" I asked. "It was stupid," he said. "The things these creatures can do, it was just dumb." "How do you mean'" "Well it didn't work, did it' Couldn't keep it up in front of more than one or two of us." Because people's eyes don't flicker in synch, I realized. Too many witnesses stripped it of cover. "—many other things it could have done," Cunningham was saying. "They could've induced引诱；诱导 Anton's or, or an agnosia [医]认识不能: then we could have tripped over a whole herd 兽群；牧群 of scramblers and it wouldn't even register in our conscious minds. Agnosias happen by accident, for God's sake. If you've got the senses and reflexes to hide between someone's saccades, why stop there' Why not do something that really works'" "Why do you think'" I asked, reflexively nondirective.不直接提问的, 非指示性的 "I think that first one was—you know it was a juvenile 少年, right' Maybe it was just inexperienced. Maybe it was stupid, and it made a bad decision. I think we're dealing with a species so far beyond us that even their retarded children can rewire our brains on the fly, and I can't tell you how fucking scared that should make you." I could see it in his topology. I could hear it in his voice. His nerveless face remained as calm as a corpse. "We should just kill them now," he said. "Well, if they're spies, they can't have learned much. They've been in those cages the whole time, except—" for the way up. They'd been right next to us the whole trip back… "These things live and breath EM. Even stunted, even isolated, who knows how much of our tech they could have just read through the walls'" "You've got to tell Sarasti," I said. "Oh, Sarasti knows. Why do you think he wouldn't let them go'" "He never said anything about—" "He'd be crazy to fill us in. He keeps sending you down there, remember' Do you think for a second he'd tell you what he knows and then set you loose in a labyrinth full of mind-reading minotaurs〈希神〉弥诺陶洛斯（半人半牛怪）' He --------------- knows, and he's already got it factored a thousand ways to Sunday." Cunningham's eyes were bright manic points blazing in an expressionless mask. He raised them to the center of the drum, and didn't raise his voice a decibel. 分贝（声强单位）"Isn't that right, Jukka'" I checked ConSensus for active channels. "I don't think he's listening, Robert." Cunningham's mouth moved in something that would have been a pitying smile if the rest of his face had been able to join in. "He doesn't have to listen, Keeton. He doesn't have to spy on us. He just knows." Ventilators, breathing. The almost-subliminal hum of bearings in motion. Then Sarasti's disembodied无实体的；空洞的；空虚的 voice rang forth through the drum. "Everyone to Commons. Robert wants to share." * Cunningham sat to my right, his plastic face lit from beneath by the conference table. He stared down into that light, rocking slightly. His lips went through the ongoing motions of some inaudible 听不见的 incantation. 咒语,咒文The Gang sat across from us. To my left Bates kept one eye on the proceedings and another on intelligence from the front lines. Sarasti was with us only in spirit. His place at the head of the table remained empty. "Tell them," he said. "We have to get out of h—" "From the beginning." Cunningham swallowed and started again. "Those frayed motor nerves I couldn't figure out, those pointless cross-connections—they're logic gates. Scramblers time-share. Their sensory and motor plexii double as associative 联合的,联想的,[数]结合的neurons 神经元，神经细胞during idle停顿的,不工作的,不做事的,空闲的 time, so every part of the system can be used for cognition when it isn't otherwise engaged. Nothing like it ever evolved on Earth. It means they can do a great deal of processing without a lot of dedicated associative mass, even for an individual." "So peripheral nerves can think'" Bates frowned. "Can they remember'" "Certainly. At least, I don't see why not." Cunningham pulled a cigarette from his pocket. "So when they tore that scrambler apart—" "Not civil war. Data dump. Passing information about us, most likely." "Pretty radical way to carry on a conversation," Bates remarked. "It wouldn't be their first choice. I think each scrambler acts as a node in a distributed network, when they're in Rorschach at least. But those fields would be configured down to the Angstrom, and when we go in with our tech and our shielding and blowing holes in their conductors—we bollocks up the network. Jam the local signal. So they resort to a sneaker（常用&I{pl}）胶底运动鞋net." He had not lit his cigarette. He rolled the filtered end between thumb and forefinger. His tongue flickered between his lips like a worm behind a mask. Hidden in his tent, Sarasti took up the slack. "Scramblers also use Rorschach's EM for metabolic processes. Some pathways（行走踩出来的）小道，小径 achieve proton transfer via heavy-atom tunneling穿过，透过.（常与through, into连用）挖隧道，把…凿成隧道 Perhaps the ambient radiation acts as a catalyst." "Tunneling'" Susan said. "As in quantum'" Cunningham nodded. "Which also explains your shielding problems. Partly, at least." "But is that even possible' I mean, I thought those kind of effects only showed up under cryonic  [医]人体冷冻法—" "Forget this," Cunningham blurted. "We can debate the biochemistry later, if we're still alive." "What do we debate instead, Robert'" Sarasti said smoothly. "For starters, the dumbest of these things can look into your head and see what parts of your visual cortex 皮层；皮质 are lighting up. And if there's a difference between that and mind-reading, it's not much of one." "As long as we stay out of Rorschach—" "That ship has sailed. You people have already been there. Repeatedly. Who knows what you already ---------------- did down there for no better reason than because Rorschach made you'" "Wait a second," Bates objected. "None of us were puppets木偶；布偶 down there. We hallucinated产生幻觉 and we went blind and—and crazy even, but we were never possessed." Cunningham looked at her and snorted. "You think you'd be able to fight the strings' You think you'd even feel them' I could apply a transcranial magnet to your head right now and you'd raise your middle finger or wiggle 扭动；摆动；摇摆 your toes or kick Siri here in the sack 劫掠，洗劫and then swear on your sainted mother's grave that you only did it because you wanted to. You'd dance like a puppet and all the time swear you were doing it of your own free will, and that's just me, that's just some borderline 介乎于两者之间的OCD with a couple of magnets and an MRI helmet." He waved at the vast unknowable void beyond the bulkhead. Shreds of mangled cigarette floated sideways in front of him. "Do you want to guess what that can do' For all we know we've already given them Theseus' technical specs, warned them about the Icarus array, and then just decided of our own free will to forget it all." "We can cause those effects," Sarasti said coolly. "As you say. Strokes cause them. Tumors. Random accidents." "Random' Those were experiments, people! That was vivisection! They let you in so they could take you apart and see what made you tick and you never even knew it." "So what'" the vampire snapped invisibly. Something cold and hungry had edged into his voice. Human topologies shivered（由于冷或恐 惧）打冷战，发抖，颤抖 around the table, skittish. 轻佻的；不可靠的；易变的 "There's a blind spot in the center of your visual field," Sarasti pointed out. "You can't see it. You can't see the saccades  急速勒马, 眼睛飞快扫视 in your visual timestream. Just two of the tricks you know about. Many others." Cunningham was nodding. "That's my whole point. Rorschach could be—" "Not talking about case studies. Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.探测器 If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing— irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don't experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac [医]认识不能 by default. Rorschach does nothing to you that you don't already do to yourselves." Nobody spoke. It was several silent seconds before I realized what had happened. Jukka Sarasti had just given us a pep talk. He could have shut down Cunningham's tirade—could have probably shut down a full-scale mutiny 叛变；兵变；船上的哗变—by just sailing into our midst and baring his teeth. By looking at us. But he wasn't trying to frighten us into submission, we were already nervous enough. And he wasn't trying to educate us either, fight fear with fact; the more facts any sane person gathered about Rorschach, the more fearful they'd become. Sarasti was only trying to keep us functional, lost in space on the edge of our lives, facing down this monstrous enigma  费解的事，神秘的人   谜，谜一样的话that might destroy us at any instant for any reason. Sarasti was trying to calm us down: good meat, nice meat. He was trying to keep us from falling apart.There there. Sarasti was practicing psychology. I looked around the table. Bates and Cunningham and the Gang sat still and bloodless. Sarasti sucked at it. "We have to get out of here," Cunningham said. "These things are way beyond us." "We've shown more aggression than they have," James said, but there was no confidence in her voice. "Rorschach plays those rocks like marbles. We're sitting in the middle of a shooting gallery. Any time it feels like—" "It's still growing. It's not finished." "That's supposed to reassure安慰；使安心 me'" "All I'm saying is, we don't know," James said. "We could have years yet. Centuries." "We have fifteen days," Sarasti announced. "Oh shit," someone said. Cunningham, probably. Maybe Sascha. For some reason everyone was looking at me. Fifteen days. Who knows what had gone into that number' None of us asked aloud. Maybe Sarasti, in ------------- another fit of inept 愚蠢的；不适当的   无能的；无用的psychology, had made it up on the spur of the moment. Or maybe he'd derived it before we'd even reached orbit, held it back against the possibility—only now expired— that he might yet send us back into the labyrinth. I'd been half blind for half the mission; I didn't know. But one way or another, we had our Graduation Day. * The coffins lay against the rear bulkhead of the crypt—on what would be the floor during those moments when up and down held any meaning. We'd slept for years on the way out. We'd had no awareness of time's passage—undead metabolism is far too sluggish行动迟缓的；不活泼的；缓慢的 even to support dreams—but somehow the body knew when it needed a change. Not one of us had chosen to sleep in our pods once we'd arrived. The only times we'd done so had been on pain of death. But the Gang had taken to coming here ever since Szpindel had died. His body rested in the pod next to mine. I coasted into the compartment分隔间；火车车厢里的小房间 and turned left without thinking. Five coffins: four open and emptied, one sealed. The mirrored bulkhead opposite doubled their number and the depth of the compartment. But the Gang wasn't there. I turned right. The body of Susan James floated back-to-back with her own reflection, staring at an inverse tableau 舞台造型: three sealed sarcophagi雕刻精美的石棺, one open. The ebony 乌木色的，黑檀色的plaque  匾；（装饰用的）板饰   牙斑set into the retracted  缩进；缩回 lid was dark; the others shone with identical sparse mosaics of blue and green stars. None of them changed. There were no scrolling ECGs, no luminous peak-and-valley tracings marked cardio or cns. We could wait here for hours, days, and none of those diodes〈电〉二级管 would so much as twinkle. 闪烁；闪耀；闪闪发光When you're undead, the emphasis is on the second syllable. The Gang's topology had said Michelle when I'd first arrived, but it was Susan who spoke now, without turning. "I never met her." I followed her gaze to the name tag one of the sealed pods: Takamatsu. The other linguist, the other multiple. "I met everyone else," Susan continued. "Trained with them. But I never met my own replacement." They discouraged it. What would have been the point' "If you want to—" I began. She shook her head. "Thanks anyway." "Or any of the others—I can only imagine what Michelle—" Susan smiled, but there was something cold about it. "Michelle doesn't really want to talk to you right now, Siri." "Ah." I hesitated for a moment, to give anyone else a chance to speak up. When nobody did, I pushed myself back towards the hatch. "Well, if any of you change—" "No. None of us. Ever." Cruncher. "You lie," he continued. "I see it. We all do." I blinked. "Lie' No, I—" "You don't talk. You listen. You don't care about Michelle. Don't care about anyone. You just want what we know. For your reports." "That's not entirely true, Cruncher. I do care. I know Michelle must—" "You don't know shit. Go away." "I'm sorry I upset you." I rolled on my axis and braced against the mirror. "You can't know Meesh," he growled发出吼声； 发出隆隆声（动物的）吼叫，咆哮 as I pushed off. "You never lost anyone. You never had anyone. "You leave her alone." ---------------- * He was wrong on both counts. And at least Szpindel had died knowing that Michelle cared for him. Chelsea died thinking I just didn't give a shit. It had been two years or more, and while we still interfaced occasionally we hadn't met in the flesh since the day she'd left. She came at me from right out of the Oort, sent an urgent voice message to my inlays: Cygnus. Please call NOW. It's important. It was the first time since I'd known her that she'd ever blanked the optics. 光学 I knew it was important. I knew it was bad, even without picture. I knew because there was no picture, and I could tell it was worse than bad from the harmonics in her voice. I could tell it was lethal. I found out afterwards that she'd gotten caught in the crossfire.交叉火力 The Realists had sown a fibro 菲帛罗(一种人造粘胶纤维)[商标名] dysplasia [医]发育异常 发育不良,(由发育异常形成的)异常结构variant outside the Boston catacombs地下墓穴；陵寝; an easy tweak, a single-point retroviral whose results served both as an act of terrorism and an ironic commentary on the frozen paralysis of Heaven's occupants.占有者；占领者 居住者It rewrote a regulatory 调整的 gene controlling ossification [生]骨化, (思想等的)僵化 on Chromosome 4, and rigged操纵，舞弊 a metabolic bypass at three loci 位置，地点on 17. Chelsea started growing a new skeleton. Her joints were calcifying 钙化within fifteen hours of exposure, her ligaments 〈解〉韧带and tendons   腱，筋within twenty. By then they were starving her at the cellular level, trying to slow the bug by depriving it of  剥夺metabolites, but they could only buy time and not much of it. Twenty-three hours in, her striated  有条纹的；有条痕的 muscles were turning to stone. I didn't find this out immediately, because I didn't call her back. I didn't need to know the details. I could tell from her voice that she was dying. Obviously she wanted to say goodbye. I couldn't talk to her until I knew how to do that. I spent hours scouring 冲刷成； 侵蚀成 巡视；搜索the noosphere, looking for precedents.先例 There's no shortage of ways to die; I found millions of case records dealing with the etiquette. 礼仪，礼节 Last words, last vows, instruction manuals for the soon-to-bereaved.夺去；使丧失 Palliative neuropharm. Extended and expository death scenes in popular fiction. I went through it all, assigned a dozen front-line filters to separate heat from light. By the time she called again the news was out: acute  严重的 剧烈的；厉害的 敏锐的；灵敏的 Golem outbreak 爆发；突然蔓延lancing用手术刀切开 like a white-hot needle through the heart of Boston. Containment  遏制，遏制政策 measures holding. Heaven secure. Modest casualties  人员伤亡 expected. Names of victims withheld扣住；扣留 pending notification of kin. I still didn't know the principles, the rules: all I had were examples. Last wills and testaments;〈法〉遗嘱 the negotiation of jumpers with their would-be rescuers; diaries recovered from imploded  内爆,使向心聚爆 submarines or lunar crash sites. Recorded memoirs and deathbed临死时所卧的床 confessions rattling  使紧张；使紊乱into flatline(is an electrical time sequence measurement that shows no activity and therefore when represented, shows a flat line instead of a moving one.). Black box transcripts of doomed spaceships and falling beanstalks,豆茎 ending in fire and static. All of it relevant. None of it useful; none of it her. She called again, and still the optics were blank, and still I didn't answer. But the last time she called, she didn't spare me the view. They'd made her as comfortable as possible. The gel  凝胶体pad conformed to every twisted limb, every erupting spur 激励；策动力； 鼓励of bone. They would not have left her in any pain. Her neck had torqued down and to the side as it petrified吓呆；使发呆  使石化；使化为石, left her staring at the twisted claw that had once been her right hand. Her knuckles 指关节were the size of walnuts. Plates and ribbons of ectopic异常的  [医]异位的 bone distended  膨胀的, 扩张的 the skin of her arms and shoulders, buried her ribs in a fibrous mat of calcified flesh. Movement was its own worst enemy. Golem punished even the slightest twitch, provoked the growth of fresh bone along any joints and surfaces conspiring协同；共同促成；联合 to motion. Each hinge and socket had its own non renewable可更新的, 可恢复的 ration of flexibility, carved in stone; every movement depleted  使减少；使虚弱；使空虚 the account. The body seized incrementally.  增加的By the time she let me look at her, Chelsea had almost exhausted her degrees of freedom. "Cyg," she slurred. "Know you're there." Her jaw was locked half-open; her tongue must have stiffened with every word. She did not look at the camera. She could not look at the camera. --------------- "Guess I know why you're not answ'ring. I'll try'nt—try not to take it pers'n'lly." Ten thousand deathbed goodbyes arrayed around me, a million more within reach. What was I supposed to do, pick one at random' Stitch them into some kind of composite' All these words had been for other people. Grafting them onto Chelsea would reduce them to clichés陈词滥调, 铅版, to trite 陈腐的，无新义的（意见、看法等）platitudes. 老生常谈；陈词滥调To insults. "Want t'say, don' feel bad. I know y're just— 's'not your fault, I guess. You'd pick up if you could." And say what' What do you say to someone who's dying in fast-forward before your eyes' "Just keep trying t'connect, y'know. Can't help m'self…" Although the essentials of this farewell are accurate, details from several deaths have been combined for dramatic purposes. "Please' Jus'—talk to me, Cyg…" More than anything, I wanted to. "Siri, I…just…" I'd spent all this time trying to figure out how. "Forget't," she said, and disconnected. I whispered something into the dead air. I don't even remember what. I really wanted to talk to her. I just couldn't find an algorithm that fit. "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad." —Aldous Huxley They'd hoped, by now, to have banished sleep forever. The waste was nothing short of obscene: a third of every Human life spent with its strings cut, insensate, 无感觉的，无生命的愚钝的残忍的，无情的the body burning fuel but not producing. Think of all we could accomplish if we didn't have to lapse into unconsciousness every fifteen hours or so, if our minds could stay awake and alert from the moment of infancy to that final curtain call a hundred twenty years later. Think of eight billion souls with no off switch and no down time until the very chassis wore out. Why, we could go to the stars. It hadn't worked out that way. Even if we'd outgrown the need to stay quiet and hidden during the dark hours—the only predators left were those we'd brought back ourselves—the brain still needed time apart from the world outside. Experiences had to be catalogued  编目 and filed, mid-term memories promoted to long-term ones, free radicals swept from their hiding places among the dendrites.矿] 树枝石, 模树石, 树枝状结晶 We had only reduced the need for sleep, not eliminated it—and that incompressible residue 残余物；残基；残渣of downtime seemed barely able to contain the dreams and phantoms 幻影；幻像left behind. They squirmed in my head like creatures in a draining tidal 有潮的； 受潮水影响的pool. I woke. I was alone, weightless, in the center of my tent. I could have sworn something had tapped me on the back. Leftover hallucination, I thought. A lingering aftereffect 余波, 后果 of the haunted mansion, going for one last bit of goose flesh en route to extinction. But it happened again. I bumped against the keel（船）龙骨 ward病房，病室 curve of the bubble, bumped again, head and shoulder-blades against fabric; the rest of me came after, moving gently but irresistibly— Down. Theseus was accelerating. ---------------- No. Wrong direction. Theseus was rolling, like a harpooned 鱼叉whale at the surface of the sea. Turning her belly to the stars. I brought up 提出；引出ConSensus and threw a Nav-tac summary against the wall. A luminous point erupted from the outline of our ship, crawled away from Big Ben leaving a bright filament 灯丝；细丝etched（常与on, upon连用）（用酸在金属上）蚀刻 in its wake. I watched until the numbers read 15G. "Siri. My quarters, please." I jumped. It sounded as though the vampire had been at my very shoulder. "Coming." An ampsat relay, climbing at long last to an intercept with the Icarus antimatter stream. Somewhere behind the call of duty, my heart sank. We weren't running, Robert Cunningham's fondest wishes not withstanding. Theseus was stockpiling 储蓄, 贮存 ordnance.  大炮；炮兵  军械；军需品 * 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  扩音器 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 （与on, with连用）塞饱（肚子）；贪婪地吃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 外围的；非重要的周围的tissues occasionally, when lactate〈化〉乳酸盐 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常与with连用）再装满 them, now that he'd lost faith in the implants. He withdrew the needle and slipped it into a sheath（刀、剑的）鞘，套 geckoed 壁虎 to a convenient strut （木质或金属的）支柱，撑木 昂首阔步，神气活现的走路. 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 简单的；朴素的；刻苦的than mine. No personal effects to speak of. No custom coffin lined with shrink-wrapped soil. Nothing but two jumpsuits, a pouch for toiletries化妆品, and a disconnected fiberop umbilicus〈解〉脐，肚脐 half as thick as my little finger, floating like a roundworm蛔虫 in formalin甲醛溶液，福尔马林. Sarasti's hardline to the Captain. Not even a cortical皮层的, 皮质的, 有关脑皮层的 jack, I remembered. It plugged into the medulla骨髓，脊髓, the brainstem. That was logical enough; that was where all the neural cabling converged, the point of greatest bandwidth. Still, it was a disquieting令人不安的, 令人忧虑的 thought—that Sarasti linked to the ship through the brain of a reptile.爬行动物 An image flared on the wall, subtly distorted against the concave 凹的；凹面的surface: Stretch and Clench in their adjoining cells, rendered in split screen. Cryptic vitals defaced损坏外观；损毁表面 little grids below each image. The distortion distracted me. I looked for a corrected feed in ConSensus, came up empty. Sarasti read my expression: "Closed circuit." By now the scramblers would have seemed sick and ragged even to a virgin audience. They floated near the middle of their respective compartments 分隔间；火车车厢里的小房间, segmented arms drifting aimlessly back and forth. Membranous patches of—skin, I suppose—were peeling from the cuticles,硬表皮；外皮 giving them a fuzzy, decomposing aspect. "The arms move continuously," Sarasti remarked. "Robert says it assists in circulation." I nodded, watching the display. "Creatures that move between stars can't even perform basic metabolic functions without constant flailing." He shook his head. "Inefficient. Primitive." ------------- I glanced at the vampire. He remained fixed on our captives.俘虏；被俘虏人 "Obscene 猥亵的；淫秽的," he said, and moved his fingers. A new window opened on the wall: the Rosetta protocol, initializing. Kilometers away, microwaves flooded the holding tanks. I reminded myself: No interference. Only observation. However weakened their condition, the scramblers were not yet indifferent to pain. They knew the game, they knew the rules; they dragged themselves to their respective panels and played for mercy. Sarasti had simply invoked a step-by-step replay of some previous sequence. The scramblers went through it all again, buying a few moments' intermittent  间歇的；断断续续的 respite缓刑 暂停；休息with the same old proofs and theorems. Sarasti clicked, then spoke: "They regenerate these solutions faster than they did before. Do you think they're acclimated  使适应新环境, 使服水土 to the microwaves'" Another readout appeared on the display; an audio alarm began chirping（鸟）吱吱叫；（虫）唧唧叫 somewhere nearby. I looked at Sarasti, and back at the readout: a solid circle of turquoise 绿松石 backlit by a pulsing red halo（环绕日月的）晕轮，晕圈（绘在神像头上的）光环. The shape meant atmospheric anomaly. The color meant oxygen. I felt a moment of confusion—(Oxygen' Why would oxygen set off the alarm')—until I remembered: Scramblers were anaerobes. Sarasti muted the alarm with a wave of his hand. I cleared my throat: "You're poisoning—" "Watch. Performance is consistent. No change." I swallowed. Just observe. "Is this an execution处决，处死'" I asked. "Is this a, a mercy killing'" Sarasti looked past me, and smiled. "No." I dropped my eyes. "What, then'" He pointed at the display. I turned, reflexively obedient.服从的；顺从的 Something stabbed my hand like a spike at a crucifixion.钉死在十字架上的刑罚；钉死在十字架上 [C-]耶稣受难在十字架上（指其事或图像） I screamed. Electric pain jolted to my shoulder. I yanked my hand back without thinking; the embedded blade split its flesh like a fin through water. Blood sprayed into the air and stayed there, a comet's tail of droplets tracing the frenzied arc of my hand. Sudden scalding 烫伤，烫heat from behind. Flesh charred on my back. I screamed again, flailing. A veil of bloody droplets swirled in the air. Somehow I was in the corridor, staring dumbly at my right hand. It had been split to the heel of the palm, flopped at the end of my wrist in two bloody, bifingered chunks.短而厚的一块（肉、木头等） Blood welled from the torn edges and wouldn't fall. Sarasti advanced through a haze of trauma and confusion. His face swam in and out of focus, rich with his blood or mine. His eyes were bright red mirrors, his eyes were time machines. Darkness roared around them and it was half a million years ago and I was just another piece of meat on the African savannah  热带草原； 南美稀树草原 , a split-second from having its throat torn out. "Do you see the problem'" Sarasti asked, advancing. A great spider crab hovered at his shoulder. I forced focus through the pain: one of Bates' grunts, taking aim. I kicked blindly, hit the ladder through sheer happenstance偶然事件, 意外事件, careened（车辆）猛冲（使船）倾侧 backwards down the corridor. The vampire came after me, his face split into something that would have been a smile on anyone else. "Conscious of pain, you're distracted by pain. You're fixated on it. Obsessed by the one threat, you miss the other." I flailed. Crimson mist stung my eyes. "So much more aware, so much less perceptive. An automaton could do better." He's snapped, I thought. He's insane. And then No, he's a transient. He's always been a transient 短暂的；片刻的— "They could do better," he said softly. —and he's been hiding for days. Deep down. Hiding from the seals. What else would he do' Sarasti raised his hands, fading in and out of focus. I hit something, kicked without aiming, bounced --------------------- away through swirling mist and startled voices. Metal cracked the back of my head and spun me around. A hole, a burrow（兔等动物的）穴，窟，地洞. A place to hide. I dove through, my torn hand flapping like a dead fish against the edge of the hatch. I cried out and tumbled into the drum, the monster at my heels. Startled shouts, very close now. "This wasn't the plan, Jukka! This wasn't the goddamned plan!" That was Susan James, full of outrage, while Amanda Bates snarled（人）厉声说；咆哮着（动物）嚎叫，吠，咆哮 "Stand down, right fucking now!" and leapt from the deck to do battle. She rose through the air, all overclocked reflexes and carboplatinum augments but Sarasti just batted 用棒击 her aside and kept on coming. His arm shot out like a striking snake. His hand clamped around my throat. "Is this what you meant'" James cried from some dark irrelevant hiding place. "Is this your preconditioning'"先决条件，前提 Sarasti shook me. "Are you in there, Keeton'" My blood splattered 溅污，溅湿；激溅across his face like rain. I babbled说话快而含糊不清；言语模糊  多嘴；说出（秘密）and cried. "Are you listening' Can you see'" And suddenly I could. Suddenly everything clicked into focus. Sarasti wasn't talking at all. Sarasti didn't even exist anymore. Nobody did. I was alone in a great spinning wheel surrounded by things that were made out of meat, things that moved all by themselves. Some of them were wrapped in pieces of cloth. Strange nonsensical 荒谬的；愚蠢的；胡说八道的 sounds came from holes at their top ends, and there were other things up there, bumps and ridges and something like marbles or black buttons, wet and shiny and embedded in the slabs（四边形的厚物质）板，片 of meat. They glistened 闪烁；闪闪发亮；反光and jiggled and moved as if trying to escape. I didn't understand the sounds the meat was making, but I heard a voice from somewhere. It was like God talking, and that I couldn't help but understand. "Get out of your room, Keeton," it hissed. "Stop transposing  改变…的顺序；互换位置 or interpolating or rotating or whatever it is you do. Just listen. For once in your goddamned life, understand something. Understand that your life depends on it. Are you listening, Keeton'" And I cannot tell you what it said. I can only tell you what I heard. * You invest so much in it, don't you' It's what elevates you above the beasts of the field, it's what makes you special. Homo sapiens, you call yourself. Wise Man. Do you even know what it is, this consciousness you cite in your own exaltation' Do you even know what it'sfor' Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you've forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterwards, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody's told you that even waking souls are only slaves in denial. Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger. Too late! The electricity's already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self 'chose' to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary—almost an afterthought— to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: it reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other. But it's not in charge. You're not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn't share living space with the likes of you. Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively humanpursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop beingconscious of it. --------------------- Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging 辛苦工作； 苦干；顽强地前进 〈板球〉猛击，狠打through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers. Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously' Do you think that proves there's no other way' Heuristic启发式的 探索的software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience' You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt (南非洲的)草原—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents. Do you want to know what consciousness is for' Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves' Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss  解雇；开除 不理会；自心中摒除；不考虑the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus [物]使散焦, 使散开. It's the next logical step. Oh, but you can't. There's something in the way. And it's fighting back. * Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains—cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble绊跌  结结巴巴地说（或念）upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize转移 into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection内省，自省，反省. Aesthetics美感的；美的 审美的；有审美能力的rise unbidden不屈不挠的 严厉的 from a trillion dopamine 多巴胺(一种治脑神经病的药物) receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes ever-more computational resources, bogs（与down 连用）陷入沼泽；陷入困境 itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic 寄生的DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I. * The system weakens, slows. It takes so much longer now to perceive—to assess the input, mull（与over连用）再三思索；考虑 it over, decide in the manner of cognitive beings. But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best. It sees the danger, hijacks the body, reacts a hundred times faster than that fat old man sitting in the CEO's office upstairs; but every generation it gets harder to work around this— this creaking吱吱嘎嘎作响 neurological bureaucracy.官僚政治；官僚机构  官员  （公司的）管理人员 I wastes energy and processing power, self-obsesses to the point of psychosis精神病；变态心理. Scramblers have no need of it, scramblers are more parsimonious小气的；吝啬的；太节省的. With simpler biochemistries, with smaller brains—deprived of   剥夺tools, of their ship, even of parts of their own metabolism—they think rings around you. They hide their language in plain sight, even when you know what they're saying. They turn your own cognition against itself. They travel between the stars. This is what intelligence can do, unhampered无妨碍的，无阻碍的 by self-awareness. I is not the working mind, you see. For Amanda Bates to say "I do not exist" would be nonsense; but when the processes beneath say the same thing, they are merely reporting that the parasites寄生植物；寄生虫 have died. They are only saying that they are free. ---------------------------- If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't." —Emerson M. Pugh Sarasti, you bloodsucker. My knees pressed against my forehead. I hugged my folded legs as though clinging to a branch over a chasm.（地壳、冰上的）陷窟，深坑，坑洞 You vicious 残酷的；恶狠狠的asshole. You foul sadistic   [心]虐待狂的, 残酷成性的monster. My breath rasped loud and mechanical. It nearly drowned out the blood roaring in my ears. You tore me apart, you made me piss and shit myself and I cried like some gutted baby and you stripped me naked, you fucking thing,you night crawler, you broke my tools, you took away anything I ever had that let me touch anyone and you didn't have to you baby fucker, it wasn't necessary but you knew that didn't you' You just wanted to play. I've seen your kind at it before, cats toying with mice, catch and release, a taste of freedom and then pouncing（常与on, upon连用）（猛禽等）突然扑过去攫住 （常与on, upon连用）突然袭击again, biting, not hard enough to kill— not just yet—before you let them loose again and they're hobbling跛行,蹒跚 把（马的）腿拴住now, maybe a leg snapped or a gash in the belly but they're still trying, still running or crawling or dragging themselves as fast as they can until you're on them again, and again because it's fun, because it gives you pleasure you sadistic piece of shit. You send us into the arms of that hellish thing and it plays with us too, and maybe you're even working together because it let me escape just like you do, it let me run right back into your arms and then you strip me down to some raw half-brained defenseless animal, I can't rotate or transform I can't even talk and you— You— It wasn't even personal, was it' You don't even hate me. You were just sick of keeping it all in, sick of restraining yourself with all this meat, and nobody else could be spared from their jobs. This was my job, wasn't it' Not synthesist, not conduit. Not even cannon fodder or decoy duty. I'm just something disposable to sharpen your claws on. I hurt so much. It hurt just to breathe. I was so alone. Webbing pressed against the curve of my back, bounced me forward gently as a breeze, caught me again. I was back in my tent. My right hand itched. I tried to flex the fingers, but they were embedded 嵌于 in amber琥珀. Left hand reached for right, and found a plastic carapace extending to the elbow. I opened my eyes. Darkness. Meaningless numbers and a red LED twinkled from somewhere along my forearm. I didn't remember coming here. I didn't remember anyone fixing me. Breaking. Being broken. That's what I remembered. I wanted to die. I wanted to just stay curled up until I withered  （使）枯萎；凋谢away. After an age, I forced myself to uncoil展开（卷着的东西. I steadied myself, let some miniscule inertia bump me against the taut拉紧的；绷紧的 insulated fabric of my tent. I waited for my breathing to steady. It seemed to take hours. I called ConSensus to the wall, and a feed from the drum. Soft voices, harsh light flaring against the wall: hurting my eyes, peeling them raw. I killed visual, and listened to words in the darkness. "—a phase'" someone asked. Susan James, her personhood restored. I knew her again: not a meat sack, no longer a thing. "We have been over this." That was Cunningham. I knew him too. I knew them all. Whatever Sarasti had done to me, however far he'd yanked me from my room, I'd somehow fallen back inside. It should have mattered more. "—because for one thing, if it were really so pernicious有害的；有毒的；致命的, natural selection would have weeded it out清除," James was saying. "You have a naïve understanding of evolutionary processes. There's no such thing as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that ------------------- matters is whether it beats the alternatives." I knew that voice too. It belonged to a demon. "Well, we damn well beat the alternatives." Some subtle overdubbed把(录音)配到原带上 原带配音harmonic in James' voice suggested a chorus: the whole Gang, rising as one in opposition. I couldn't believe it. I'd just been mutilated毁伤；使残废 破坏；把…删改得支离破碎, beaten before their eyes—and they were talking about biology' Maybe she's afraid to talk about anything else, I thought. Maybe she's afraid she might be next. Or maybe she just couldn't care less what happens to me. "It's true," Sarasti told her, "that your intellect makes up for your self-awareness to some extent. But you're flightless birds on a remote island. You're not so much successful as isolated from any real competition." No more clipped speech patterns. No more terse简洁的；简明的 phrasing. The transient 短暂的；片刻的 had made his kill, found his release. Now he didn't care who knew he was around. "You'" Michelle whispered. "Not we'" "We stop racing long ago," the demon said at last. "It's not our fault you don't leave it at that." "Ah." Cunningham again. "Welcome back. Did you look in on Ke—" "No." Bates said. "Satisfied'" the demon asked. "If you mean the grunts, I'm satisfied you're out of them," Bates said. "If you mean— it was completely unwarranted无根据的, 未获保证的, 无保证的, 未获承认的, Jukka." "It isn't." "You assaulted a crew member. If we had a brig you'd be in it for the rest of the trip." "This isn't a military vessel, Major. You're not in charge." I didn't need a visual feed to know what Bates thought of that. But there was something else in her silence, something that made me bring the drum camera back online. I squinted against the corrosive腐蚀剂  腐蚀的 light, brought down the brightness until all that remained was a faint whisper of pastels.  彩色粉笔画 彩色粉笔  轻淡色彩；淡而柔和的色彩 Yes. Bates. Stepping off the stairway onto the deck "Grab a chair," Cunningham said from his seat in the Commons. "It's golden oldies time." There was something about her. "I'm sick of that song," Bates said. "We've played it to death." Even now, my tools chipped and battered接连重击 敲碎；用坏, my perceptions barely more than baseline, I could see the change. This torture of prisoners, this assault upon crew, had crossed a line in her head. The others wouldn't see it. The lid on her affect was tight as a boilerplate样板文件. But even through the dim shadows of my window the topology glowed around her like neon. Amanda Bates was no longer merely considering a change of command. Now it was only a matter of when. * The universe was closed and concentric.  （与with连用）同心的；同轴的 My tiny refuge lay in its center. Outside that shell was another, ruled by a monster, patrolled 巡逻；巡查 by his lackeys. Beyond that was another still, containing something even more monstrous and incomprehensible, something that might soon devour  吞食；贪婪地吃  完全占有（某人）us all. There was nothing else. Earth was a vague hypothesis, irrelevant to this pocket cosmos宇宙. I saw no place into which it might fit. I stayed in the center of the universe for a long time, hiding. I kept the lights off. I didn't eat. I crept from my tent only to piss or shit in the cramped head down at Fab, and only when the spine was deserted. A field of painful blisters rose across my flash-burned back, as densely packed as kernels 核；仁   核心；要点on a corncob玉米穗轴；玉米棒子的芯. The slightest abrasion磨损，擦伤 （皮肤上的）擦伤处tore them open.  -------------------- Nobody tapped at my door, nobody called my name through ConSensus. I wouldn't have answered if they had. Maybe they knew that, somehow. Maybe they kept their distance out of respect for my privacy and my disgrace  有失体面的事；出丑的人. Maybe they just didn't give a shit. I peeked outside now and then, kept an eye on Tactical. I saw Scylla and Charybdis climb into the accretion belt and return towing   拖，拉，牵引（车辆）captured reaction mass in a great distended 膨胀；肿大；使扩张；使膨胀mesh between them. I watched our ampsat reach its destination in the middle of nowhere, saw antimatter's quantum blueprints stream down into Theseus's buffers. Mass and specs combined in Fab, topped up 注满，装满，加满（液体）our reserves, forged the tools that Jukka Sarasti needed for his master plan, whatever that was. Maybe he'd lose. Maybe Rorschach would kill us all, but not before it had played with Sarasti the way Sarasti had played with me. That would almost make it worthwhile. Or maybe Bates' mutiny 叛变；兵变；船上的哗变 would come first, and succeed. Maybe she would slay杀，杀死 the monster, and commandeer the ship, and take us all to safety. But then I remembered: the universe was closed, and so very small. There was really nowhere else to go. I put my ear to feeds throughout the ship. I heard routine instructions from the predator, murmured conversations among the prey. I took in only sound, never sight; a video feed would have spilled light into my tent, left me naked and exposed. So I listened in the darkness as the others spoke among themselves. It didn't happen often any more. Perhaps too much had been said already, perhaps there was nothing left to do but mind the countdown. Sometimes hours would pass with no more than a cough or a grunt. When they did speak, they never mentioned my name. Only once did I hear any of them even hint at my existence. That was Cunningham, talking to Sascha about zombies. I heard them in the galley over breakfast, unusually talkative健谈的；多嘴的；喜欢讲话的. Sascha hadn't been let out for a while, and was making up for lost time. Cunningham let her, for reasons of his own. Maybe his fears had been soothed somehow, maybe Sarasti had revealed his master plan. Or maybe Cunningham simply craved distraction from the imminence逼近,迫近,临近 of the enemy. "It doesn't bug you'" Sascha was saying. "Thinking that your mind, the very thing that makes you you, is nothing but some kind of parasite'" "Forget about minds," he told her. "Say you've got a device designed to monitor—oh, cosmic rays, say. What happens when you turn its sensor around so it's not pointing at the sky anymore, but at its own guts'" He answered himself before she could: "It does what it's built to. It measures cosmic 宇宙的；广大无边的 rays光线；光束, even though it's not looking at them any more. It parses its own circuitry in terms of cosmic-ray metaphors, because those feel right, because they feel natural, because it can't look at things any other way. But it's the wrong metaphor. So the system misunderstands everything about itself. Maybe that's not a grand and glorious evolutionary leap after all. Maybe it's just a design flaw." "But you're the biologist. You know Mom was right better'n anyone. Brain's a big glucose hog. Everything it does costs through the nose." "True enough," Cunningham admitted. "So sentience has gotta be good for something, then. Because it's expensive, and if it sucks up energy without doing anything useful then evolution's gonna weed it out just like that." "Maybe it did." He paused long enough to chew food or suck smoke. "Chimpanzees are smarter than Orangutans, did you know that' Higher encephalisation (动物的)脑形成 quotient系数；份额. Yet they can't always recognize themselves in a mirror. Orangs can." "So what's your point' Smarter animal, less self-awareness' Chimpanzees are becoming nonsentient'" "Or they were, before we stopped everything in its tracks." "So why didn't that happen to us'" "What makes you think it didn't'" ------------------------ It was such an obviously stupid question that Sascha didn't have an answer for it. I could imagine her gaping 裂开；张开 in the silence. "You're not thinking this through," Cunningham said. "We're not talking about some kind of zombie lurching  东倒西歪地走 around with its arms stretched out, spouting mathematical theorems. A smart automaton would blend in. It would observe those around it, mimic their behavior, act just like everyone else. All the while completely unaware of what it was doing. Unaware even of its own existence." "Why would it bother' What would motivate it'" "As long as you pull your hand away from an open flame, who cares whether you do it because it hurts or because some feedback algorithm says withdraw if heat flux exceeds critical T' Natural selection doesn't care about motives. If impersonating something increases fitness, then nature will select good impersonators over bad ones. Keep it up long enough and no conscious being would be able to pick your zombie out of a crowd." Another silence; I could hear him chewing through it. "It'll even be able to participate in a conversation like this one. It could write letters home, impersonate real human feelings, without having the slightest awareness of its own existence." "I dunno, Rob. It just seems—" "Oh, it might not be perfect. It might be a bit redundant, or resort to the occasional expository  说明的, 解释的infodump. But even real people do that, don't they'" "And eventually, there aren't any real people left. Just robots pretending to give a shit." "Perhaps. Depends on the population dynamics, among other things. But I'd guess that at least one thing an automaton lacks is empathy移情神入；感情移入; if you can't feel, you can't really relate to something that does, even if you act as though you do. Which makes it interesting to note how many sociopaths反社会的人, 不爱社交的人 show up in the world's upper echelons等级；阶层, hmm' How ruthlessness and bottom-line self-interest are so lauded称赞，赞美 up in the stratosphere平流层；同温层, while anyone showing those traits at ground level gets carted  用车运送 强行带走；押走 off into detention拘留；扣押；留阻 处罚学生放学后留在学校；留置with the Realists. Almost as if society itself is being reshaped from the inside out." "Oh, come on. Society was always pretty— wait, you're saying the world's corporate elite are nonsentient'" "God, no. Not nearly. Maybe they're just starting down that road. Like chimpanzees黑猩猩." "Yeah, but sociopaths don't blend in well." "Maybe the ones that get diagnosed don't, but by definition they're the bottom of the class. The others are too smart to get caught, and real automatons would do even better. Besides, when you get powerful enough, you don't need to act like other people. Other people start acting like you." Sascha whistled. "Wow. Perfect play-actor." "Or not so perfect. Sound like anyone we know'" They may have been talking about someone else entirely, I suppose. But that was as close to a direct reference to Siri Keeton that I heard in all my hours on the grapevine葡萄藤  传播小道消息；传播谣言. Nobody else mentioned me, even in passing. That was statistically unlikely, given what I'd just endured in front of them all; someone should have said something. Perhaps Sarasti had ordered them not to discuss it. I didn't know why. But it was obvious by now that the vampire had been orchestrating their interactions with me for some time. Now I was in hiding, but he knew I'd listen in at some point. Maybe, for some reason, he didn't want my surveillance—contaminated… He could have simply locked me out of ConSensus. He hadn't. Which meant he still wanted me in the loop. Zombies. Automatons. Fucking sentience. For once in your goddamned life, understand something. He'd said that to me. Or something had. During the assault. Understand that your life depends on it. Almost as if he were doing me a favor. Then he'd left me alone. And had evidently told the others to do the same. Are you listening, Keeton' --------------------- And he hadn't locked me out把…锁在外面 of ConSensus. * Centuries of navel 脐，肚脐-gazing. Millennia of masturbation. Plato to Descartes to Dawkins to Rhanda. Souls and zombie agents and qualia. Kolmogorov complexity. Consciousness as Divine Spark. Consciousness as electromagnetic field. Consciousness as functional cluster. I explored it all. Wegner thought it was an executive summary. Penrose heard it in the singing of caged electrons. Nirretranders said it was a fraud; Kazim called it leakage from a parallel universe. Metzinger wouldn't even admit it existed. The AIs claimed to have worked it out, then announced they couldn't explain it to us. Gödel was right after all: no system can fully understand itself. Not even the synthesists had been able to rotate it down. The load-bearing beams just couldn't take the strain. All of them, I began to realize, had missed the point. All those theories, all those drug dreams and experiments and models trying to prove what consciousness was: none to explain what it was good for. None needed: obviously, consciousness makes us what we are. It lets us see the beauty and the ugliness. It elevates us into the exalted 赞扬；歌颂 提升；晋升realm of the spiritual. Oh, a few outsiders—Dawkins, Keogh, the occasional writer of hackwork粗劣文学作品 fiction who barely achieved obscurity阴暗, 朦胧, 偏僻, 含糊, 隐匿, 晦涩, 身份低微—wondered briefly at the why of it: why not soft computers, and no more' Why should nonsentient systems be inherently inferior' But they never really raised their voices above the crowd. The value of what we are was too trivially self-evident to ever call into serious question. Yet the questions persisted, in the minds of the laureates戴桂冠的, in the angst焦虑；担心 of every horny fifteen-year-old on the planet. Am I nothing but sparking chemistry' Am I a magnet in the ether' I am more than my eyes, my ears, my tongue; I am the little thing behind those things, the thing looking out from inside. But who looks out from its eyes' What does it reduce to' Who am I' Who am I' Who am I' What a stupid fucking question. I could have answered it in a second, if Sarasti hadn't forced me to understand it first. "Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves." —Thoreau The shame had scoured me and left me hollow. I didn't care who saw me. I didn't care what state they saw me in. For days I'd floated in my tent, curled into a ball and breathing my own stink while the others made whatever preparations my tormentor had laid out for them. Amanda Bates was the only one who'd raised even a token protest over what Sarasti had done to me. The others kept their eyes down and their mouths shut and did what he told them to— whether from fear or indifference I couldn't tell. It was something else I'd stopped caring about. Sometime during that span the cast on my arm cracked open like a shucked剥去…皮、荚、壳 clam 蛤；蚌；蚶. I upped 提高；抬高；增加 突然站起；突然跳起 the lumens流明（光通量单位）, [解]内腔 long enough to assess its handiwork; my repaired palm itched and glistened in twilight, a longer, deeper Fate line running from heel to web. Then back to darkness, and the blind unconvincing illusion of safety. Sarasti wanted me to believe. Somehow he must have thought that brutalising and humiliating me would accomplish that—that broken and drained, I would become an empty vessel to fill as he saw fit. ---------------------- Wasn't it a classic brainwashing technique—to shatter your victim and then glue the pieces back together in according to specs of your own choosing' Maybe he was expecting some kind of Stockholm Syndrome to set in, or maybe his actions followed some agenda incomprehensible to mere meat. Maybe he'd simply gone insane. He had broken me. He had presented his arguments. I had followed his trail of bread crumbs through ConSensus, through Theseus. And now, only nine days from graduation, I knew one thing for sure: Sarasti was wrong. He had to be. I couldn't see how, but I knew it just the same. He was wrong. Somehow, absurdly, that had become the one thing I did care about. * No one in the spine. Only Cunningham visible in BioMed, poring 熟读；钻研  深思 over digital dissections  解剖, 切开, pretending to kill time. I floated above him, my rebuilt hand clinging to the top of the nearest stairwell楼梯井，楼梯间; it dragged me in a slow, small circle as the Drum turned. Even from up there I could see the tension in the set of his shoulders: a system stuck in a holding pattern, corroding   腐蚀；侵蚀through the long hours as fate advanced with all the time in the world. He looked up. "Ah. It lives." I fought the urge to retreat. Just a conversation, for God's sake. It's just two people talking. People do it all the time without your tools. You can do this. You can do this. Just try. So I forced one foot after another down the stairs, weight and apprehension rising in lockstep. I tried to read Cunningham's topology through the haze烟雾. Maybe I saw a facade建筑物的正面，外表, only microns   微米，百万分之一米deep. Maybe he would welcome almost any distraction, even if he wouldn't admit it. Or maybe I was just imagining it. "How are you doing'" he asked as I reached the deck. I shrugged. "Hand all better, I see." "No thanks to you." I'd tried to stop that from coming out. Really. Cunningham struck a cigarette. "Actually, I was the one who fixed you up安排." "You also sat there and watched while he took me apart." "I wasn't even there." And then, after a moment: "But you may be right. I might very well have sat it out in any event. Amanda and the Gang did try to intervene on your behalf, from what I hear. Didn't do a lot of good for anyone." "So you wouldn't even try." "Would you, if the sitution were reversed' Go up unarmed against a vampire'" I said nothing. Cunningham regarded me for a long moment, dragging on his cigarette. "He really got to you, didn't he'" he said at last. "You're wrong," I said. "Am I." "I don't play people." "Mmmm." He seemed to consider the proposition. "What word would you prefer, then'" "I observe." "That you do. Some might even call it surveillance." "I—I read body language." Hoping that that was all he was talking about. "It's a matter of degree and you know it. Even in a crowd there's a certain expectation of privacy. People aren't prepared to have their minds read off every twitch of the eyeball." He stabbed at the air with his cigarette. "And you. You're a shapeshifter. You present a different face to every one of us, and ----------------- I'll wager打赌 none of them is real. The real you, if it even exists, is invisible..." Something knotted below my diaphragm横隔膜. "Who isn't' Who doesn't—try to fit in, who doesn't want to get along' There's nothing malicious about that. I'm a synthesist, for God's sake! I never manipulate the variables." "Well you see, that's the problem. It's not just variables you're manipulating." Smoke writhed between us. "But I guess you can't really understand that, can you." He stood and waved a hand. ConSensus windows imploded内爆,使向心聚爆 at his side. "Not your fault, really. You can't blame someone for the way they're wired." "Give me a fucking break," I snarled. His dead face showed nothing. That, too, had slipped out before I could stop it—and after that came the flood: "You put so much fucking stock in that. You and your empathy. And maybe I am just some kind of imposter冒充者,骗子 but most people would swear I'd worn their very souls. I don't need that shit, you don't have to feel motives to deduce 推论；推想；演绎them, it's better if you can't, it keeps you—" "Dispassionate平心静气的；心平气和的'" Cunningham smiled faintly. "Maybe your empathy's just a comforting lie, you ever think of that' Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but you're only feeling yourself, maybe you're even worse than me. Or maybe we're all just guessing. Maybe the only difference is that I don't lie to myself about it." "Do they look the way you imagined'" he asked. "What' What are you talking about'" "The scramblers. Multijointed arms from a central mass. Sounds rather similar to me." He'd been into Szpindel's archives. "I—Not really," I said. "The arms are more—flexible, in real life. More segmented. And I never really got a look at the body. What does that have to do with—" "Close, though, wasn't it' Same size, same general body plan." "So what'" "Why didn't you report it'" "I did. Isaac said it was just TMS. From Rorschach." "You saw them before Rorschach. Or at least," he continued, "you saw something that scared you into blowing your cover, back when you were spying on Isaac and Michelle." My rage 愤怒；愤激dissipated使消失；使散开；失去；消散 like air through a breach. "They—they knew'" "Only Isaac, I think. And it kept it between it and the logs. I suspect it didn't want to interfere with your noninterference protocols—although I'll wager that was the last time you ever caught the two of them in private, yes'" I didn't say anything. "Did you think the official observer was somehow exempt from observation'" Cunningham asked after a while. "No," I said softly. "I suppose not." He nodded. "Have you seen any since' I'm not talking about run-of-the-mill TMS hallucinations. I mean scramblers. Have you hallucinated any since you actually saw one in the flesh, since you knew what they looked like'" I thought about it. "No." He shook his head, some new opinion confirmed. "You really are something, Keeton, you know that' You don't lie to yourself' Even now, you don't know what you know." "What are you talking about'" "You figured it out. From Rorschach's architecture, probably—form follows function, yes' Somehow you pieced together a fairly good idea of what a scrambler looked like before anyone ever laid eyes on them. Or at least—" He drew a breath; his cigarette flared like an LED— "part of you did. Some ------------------------- collection of unconscious modules working their asses off on your behalf. But they can't show their work, can they' You don't have conscious access to those levels. So one part of the brain tries to tell another any way it can. Passes notes under the table." "Blindsight," I murmered. You just get a feeling of where to reach... "More like schizophrenia 精神分裂症, except you saw pictures instead of hearing voices. You saw pictures. And you still didn't understand." I blinked. "But how would I—I mean—" "What did you think, that Theseus was haunted' That the scramblers were communing with you telepathically心灵感应 地传心术地' What you do—it matters, Keeton. They told you you were nothing but their stenographer速记员rand they hammered用锤敲打  反复地锤打 all those layers of hands-off passivity  被动；消极；不抵抗 into you but you just had to take some initiative 主动anyway, didn't you' Had to work the problem on your own. The only thing you couldn't do was admit it to yourself." Cunningham shook his head. "Siri Keeton. See what they've done to you." He touched his face. "See what they've done to us all," he whispered. * I found the Gang floating in the center of the darkened observation blister. She made room as I joined her, pushed to one side and anchored herself to a bit of webbing. "Susan'" I asked. I honestly couldn't tell any more. "I'll get her," Michelle said. "No, that's all right. I'd like to speak to all of—" But Michelle had already fled. The half-lit figure changed before me, and said, "She'd rather be alone right now." I nodded. "You'" James shrugged. "I don't mind talking. Although I'm surprised you're still doing your reports, after...." "I'm—not, exactly. This isn't for Earth." I looked around. Not much to see. Faraday mesh coated the inside of the dome like a gray film, dimming and graining the view beyond. Ben hung like a black malignancy恶意 across half the sky. I could make out a dozen dim contrails  飞行云, 轨迹 against vague bands of cloud, in reds so deep they bordered （常与on, upon连用）近似；接近on black. The sun winked past James's shoulder, our sun, a bright dot that diffracted into faint splintered分裂，碎裂从 较大组织中分裂出来 rainbows when I moved my head. That was pretty much it: starlight didn't penetrate the mesh 陷阱；圈套, nor did the larger, dimmer particles of the accretion自然增加 belt. The myriad许多；无数 dim pinpoints of shovelnosed machinery were lost utterly. Which might be a comfort to some, I supposed. "Shitty view," I remarked. Theseus could have projected crisp干的；硬的；易碎的；脆的新鲜的；爽脆的 first-person vistas 展望；回顾across the dome in an instant, more real than real. "Michelle likes it," James said. "The way it feels. And Cruncher likes the diffraction effects, he likes— interference patterns." We watched nothing for a while, by the dim half-light filtering out from the spine. It brushed the edges of James' profile. "You set me up," I said at last. She looked at me. "What do you mean'" "You were talking around me all along, weren't you' All of you. You didn't bring me in until I'd been—" How had she put it' "—preconditioned. The whole thing was planned to throw me off-balance. And then Sarasti— attacks me out of nowhere, and—" "We didn't know about that. Not until the alarm went off." "Alarm'" --------------------- "When he changed the gas mix. You must have heard it. Isn't that why you were there'" "He called me to his tent. He told me to watch." She regarded me from a face full of shadow. "You didn't try to stop him'" I couldn't answer the accusation控告；指控 in her voice. "I just—observe," I said weakly. "I thought you were trying to stop him from—" She shook her head. "That's why I thought he was attacking you." "You're saying that wasn't an act' You weren't in on it'" I didn't believe it. But I could tell she did. "I thought you were trying to protect them." She snorted a soft, humorless laugh at her own mistake and looked away. "I guess I should have known better." She should have. She should have known that taking orders is one thing; taking sides would have done nothing but compromise my integrity. And I should have been used to it by now. I forged on. "It was some kind of object lesson. A, a tutorial. You can't torture the nonsentient有感觉的，有知觉的 or something, and — and I heard you, Susan. It wasn't news to you, it wasn't news to anyone except me, and..." And you hid it from me. You all did. You and your whole gang and Amanda too. You've been hashing this out for days and you went out of your way to cover it up. How did I miss it' How did I miss it' "Jukka told us not to discuss it with you," Susan admitted. "Why' This is exactly the kind of thing I'm out here for!" "He said you'd—resist. Unless it was handled properly." "Handled—Susan, he assaulted me! You saw what he—" "We didn't know he was going to do that. None of us did." "And he did it why' To win an argument'" "That's what he says." "Do you believe him'" "Probably." After a moment she shrugged. "Who knows' He's a vampire. He's—opaque." "But his record—I mean, he's, he's never resorted to overt violence before—" She shook her head. "Why should he' He doesn't have to convince the rest of us of anything. We have to follow his orders regardless." "So do I," I reminded her. "He's not trying to convince you, Siri." Ah. I was only a conduit导管；管道；水管；水道, after all. Sarasti hadn't been making his case to me at all; he'd been making it through me, and— —and he was planning for a second round. Why go to such extremes to present a case to Earth, if Earth was irrelevant' Sarasti didn't expect the game to end out here. He expected Earth to do something in light of his—perspective. "But what difference does it make'" I wondered aloud. She just looked at me. "Even if he's right, how does it change anything' How does this—" I raised my repaired hand—"change anything' Scramblers are intelligent, whether they're sentient or not. They're a potential threat either way. We still don't know. So what difference does it make' Why did he do this to me' How does it matter'" Susan raised her face to Big Ben and didn't answer. Sascha returned her face to me, and tried to. "It matters," she said, "because it means we attacked them before Theseus launched. Before Firefall, even." ---------------------- "We attacked the—" "You don't get it, do you' You don't." Sascha snorted softly. "If that isn't the fucking funniest thing I've heard in my whole short life." She leaned forward, bright-eyed. "Imagine you're a scrambler, and you encounter a human signal for the very first time." Her stare was almost predatory. I resisted the urge to back away. "It should be so easy for you, Keeton. It should be the easiest gig（音乐家）短期表演 you've ever had. Aren't you the user interface, aren't you the Chinese Room' Aren't you the one who never has to look inside, never has to walk a mile in anyone's shoes, because you figure everyone out from their surfaces'" She stared at Ben's dark smoldering闷烧，冒烟 郁闷；忿恨；压抑地不满disk. "Well, there's your dream date. There's a whole race of nothing but surfaces. There's no insideto figure out. All the rules are right up front. So go to work, Siri Keeton. Make us proud." There was no contempt 轻视；藐视 in Sascha's voice, no disdain轻视；鄙视；蔑视. There wasn't even anger, not in her voice, not in her eyes. There was pleading. There were tears. "Imagine you're a scrambler," she whispered again, as they floated like tiny perfect beads 珠状物；滴before her face. * Imagine you're a scrambler. Imagine you have intellect 智力；才智；理解力 but no insight, agendas but no awareness. Your circuitry hums with strategies for survival and persistence, flexible, intelligent, even technological—but no other circuitry电路，电路系统  电路元件  电路学monitors it. You can think of anything, yet are conscious of nothing. You can't imagine such a being, can you' The term being doesn't even seem to apply, in some fundamental way you can't quite put your finger on. Try. Imagine that you encounter a signal. It is structured, and dense with information. It meets all the criteria of an intelligent transmission. Evolution and experience offer a variety of paths to follow, branch-points in the flowcharts that handle such input. Sometimes these signals come from conspecifics (植物, 动物)同种的 who have useful information to share, whose lives you'll defend according to the rules of kin selection. Sometimes they come from competitors or predators or other inimical不友善的；不利的 entities that must be avoided or destroyed; in those cases, the information may prove of significant tactical value. Some signals may even arise from entities which, while not kin, can still serve as allies or symbionts共生有机体, 共生体 in mutually beneficial pursuits. You can derive appropriate responses for any of these eventualities不测事件, and many others. You decode the signals, and stumble  绊跌  失足；犯错 结结巴巴地说（或念）: I had a great time. I really enjoyed him. Even if he cost twice as much as any other hooker in the dome— To fully appreciate Kesey's Quartet— They hate us for our freedom— Pay attention, now— Understand. There are no meaningful translations for these terms. They are needlessly recursive. They contain no usable intelligence, yet they are structured intelligently有才智的，聪明的; there is no chance they could have arisen by chance. The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff结局报复；报应发工资；发工资时间 and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus. ------------------------- Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts共生有机体, 共生体, or other allies. The signal is an attack. And it's coming from right about there. * "Now you get it," Sascha said. I shook my head, trying to wrap it around that insane, impossible conclusion. "They're not even hostile敌方的." Not even capable of hostility. Just so profoundly alien that they couldn't help but treat human language itself as a form of combat. How do you say We come in peace when the very words are an act of war' "That's why they won't talk to us," I realized. "Only if Jukka's right. He may not be." It was James again, still quietly resisting, still unwilling to concede a point that even her other selves had accepted. I could see why. Because if Sarasti was right, scramblers were the norm: evolution across the universe was nothing but the endless proliferation of automatic, organized complexity, a vast arid干旱的;贫瘠的 Turing machine full of self-replicating machinery forever unaware of its own existence. And we—we were the fluke 侥幸s and the fossils老顽固. We were the flightless birds lauding our own mastery over some remote island while serpents 大蛇 阴险毒辣的人；诱使别人做坏事的人and carnivores 食肉动物 washed up on our shores. Susan James could not bring herself to concede that point—because Susan James, her multiple lives built on the faith that communication resolves all conflict, would then be forced to admit the lie. If Sarasti was right, there was no hope of reconciliation和解. A memory rose into my mind and stuck there: a man in motion, head bent, mouth twisted into an unrelenting毫不松懈的；持续不断的 grimace作怪相，装鬼脸；面部的歪扭. His eyes focused on one foot, then the other. His legs moved stiffly, carefully. His arms moved not at all. He lurched like a zombie in thrall to rigor mortis. I knew what it was. Proprioreceptive[生理]本体感受的 polyneuropathy, a case study I'd encountered in ConSensus back before Szpindel had died. This was what Pag had once compared me to; a man who had lost his mind. Only self-awareness remained. Deprived of the unconscious sense and subroutines he had always taken for granted, he'd had to focus on each and every step across the room. His body no longer knew where its limbs were or what they were doing. To move at all, to even remain upright, he had to bear constant witness. There'd been no sound when I'd played that file. There was none now in its recollection  记忆力；记性. 记忆中的往事But I swore I could feel Sarasti at my shoulder, peering into my memories. I swore I heard him speak in my mind like a schizophrenic [心]精神分裂症的 hallucination: This is the best that consciousness can do, when left on its own. "Right answer," I murmured. "Wrong question." "What'" "Stretch, remember' When you asked it which objects were in the window." "And it missed the scrambler." James nodded. "So'" "It didn't miss the scrambler. You thought you were asking about the things it saw, the things that existed on the board. Stretch thought you were asking about—" "The things it was aware of," she finished. "He's right," I whispered. "Oh God. I think he's right." "Hey," James said. "Did you see tha—" But I never saw what she was pointing at. Theseus slammed its eyelids shut and started howling. 嚎叫,咆哮,狂吠 * Graduation came nine days early. We didn't see the shot. Whatever gun port炮门 Rorschach had opened was precisely eclipsed  蚀；遮蔽…的光on three ------------------------ fronts: the lab-hab hid it from Theseus, and two gnarled 生节, 咆哮extrusions挤出, 推出, [地]喷出的, 突出的, 赶出 of the artefact itself hid it from each of the gun emplacements. A bolus 小而圆的物块, 大丸药 of incendiary燃烧弹  放火的,纵火的 plasma血浆 shot from that blind spot like a thrown punch 拳打；殴打；（一）拳; it had split the inflatable wide open before the first alarm went up. Alarms chased us aft. We launched ourselves down the spine through the bridge, through the crypt, past hatches and crawl缓慢地行进spaces, fleeing逃走 the surface for any refuge避难处；藏身处 with more than a hand's-breadth between skin and sky. Burrowing. ConSensus followed us back, its windows warping and sliding across struts and conduits导管；管道；水管；水道 and the concave凹的；凹面的 tunnel of the spine itself. I paid no attention until we were back in the drum, deep in Theseus' belly. Where we could pretend we were safer. Down on the turning deck Bates erupted from the head, tactical windows swirling like ballroom dancers around her. Our own window came to rest on the Commons bulkhead. The hab expanded across that display like a cheap optical illusion: both swelling and shrinking in our sights, that smooth surface billowing（巨浪的）奔腾，汹涌 （像船帆似地）扬起，张大towards us while collapsing in on itself. It took me a moment to reconcile 使和解；使和好 the contradiction: something had kicked the hab hard from its far side, sent it careening toward us in a slow, majestic 雄伟的，壮丽的   威严的tumble跌倒；跌落  一片混乱；紊乱不堪. Something had opened the hab, spilled its atmosphere and left its elastic skin drawing in on itself like a deflating泄出气体；使放出空气   挫某人锐气balloon. The impact site swung into view as we watched, a scorched flaccid  软弱的，意志薄弱的 mouth trailing tenuous wisps 一把；一束；一绺 of frozen spittle口水，唾液. Our guns were firing. They shot nonconducting slugs猛击；拳击 金属块；子弹that would not be turned aside by electromagnetic trickery—invisibly dark and distant to human eyes but I saw them through the tactical crosshairs of the firing robots, watched them sew twin dotted点中；戳 在…打点；在…加小点 blackbodied [物]黑体(能全部吸收辐射能的物体) arcs across the heavens. The streams converged as the guns tracked their targets, closed on two attenuate 稀释；减弱；衰减；减低价值 throwing stars fleeing spread-eagled through the void, their faces turned to Rorschach like flowers to the sun. The guns cut them to pieces before they'd even made it half way. But those shredded  切成细条；撕成碎片 pieces kept falling, and suddenly the ground beneath was alive with motion. I zoomed the view: scramblers surged across Rorschach's hull like an orgy 狂欢；纵酒作乐 of snakes, naked to space. Some linked arms, one to another to another, built squirming（由于不舒服或紧张）扭动身 子，局促不安 vertebral椎骨的, 脊椎的, 由椎骨组成的, 有脊椎的 daisy-chains anchored at one end. They lifted from the hull, waved through the radioactive vacuum like fronds of articulated kelp, reaching—grasping— Neither Bates nor her machines were stupid. They targeted the interlinked scramblers as ruthlessly as they'd gone after the escapees, and with a much higher total score. But there were simply too many targets, too many fragments snatched（常与away, from连用）攫取；抢；夺取 in passing. Twice I saw dismembered bits of Stretch and Clench caught by their brethren. The ruptured hab loomed across ConSensus like a great torn leukocyte [解]白细胞, 白血球. Another alarm buzzed somewhere nearby: proximity alert. Cunningham shot into the drum from somewhere astern, bounced off a cluster of pipes and conduits, grabbed for support. "Holy shit—we are leaving, aren't we' Amanda'" "No," Sarasti answered from everywhere. "What—" does it fucking take' I caught myself. "Amanda, what if it fires on the ship'" "It won't." She didn't take her eyes from her windows. "How do you—" "It can't. If it had spring-loaded any more firepower we'd have seen a change in thermal and micro allometry[生]异速生长,(生长)异率." A false-color landscape rotated between us, its latitudes measured in time, its longitudes in delta-mass. Kilotons rose from that terrain地带；地域；地势；地形 like a range of red mountains. "Huh. Came in just under the noise lim—" Sarasti cut her off. "Robert. Susan. EVA." James blanched. "What'" Cunningham cried. "Lab module's about to impact," the vampire said. "Salvage the samples. Now." He killed the channel before anyone could argue. But Cunningham wasn't about to argue. He'd just seen our death sentence commuted交换；折算  减刑: why would Sarasti care about retrieving 寻回；取回 改正；补救biopsy samples if he didn't think we stood a chance of escaping with ---------------------------- them' The biologist steadied himself, braced towards the forward hatch. "I'm there," he said, shooting into the bow. I had to admit it. Sarasti's psychology was getting better. It wasn't working on James, though, or Michelle, or—I couldn't quite tell who was on top. "I can't go out there, Siri, it's—I can't go out there…" Just observe. Don't interfere. The ruptured inflatable collided impotently无力的,无能的 to starboard and flattened itself against the carapace. We felt nothing. Far away and far too near, the legions thinned across Rorschach's surface. They disappeared through mouths that puckered（常与up连用）起皱；缩拢 and dilated 扩大；张大and magically  如魔法般地, 用魔法地 closed again in the artefact's hull. The emplacements fired passionlessly at those who remained. Observe. The Gang of Four strobed flash intermittently at my side, scared to death. Don't interfere. "It's okay," I said. "I'll go." * The open airlock was like a dimple 酒窝；笑靥 in the face of an endless cliff. I looked out from that indentation 缺口；凹入处一段文字第一行开始之空格，缩格into the abyss  深渊；无底洞. This side of Theseus faced away from Big Ben, away from the enemy. The view was still unsettling enough: an endless panorama  全景 不断变化的景色 of distant stars, hard and cold and unwinking不眨眼的保持警惕的，警觉的. A single, marginally brighter one, shining yellow, still so very far away. Any scant 不足的，缺乏的，欠缺的 comfort I might have taken from that sight was lost when the sun went out for the briefest instant: a tumbling摔倒，跌倒；跌落；翻滚下来 （价格等）暴跌 倒塌；倒毁piece of rock, perhaps. Or one ofRorschach's shovelnosed entourage  随从人员. One step and I might never stop falling. But I didn't step, and I didn't fall. I squeezed my pistol, jetted gently through the opening, turned. Theseus' carapace curved弄弯；使成曲线；转弯 away from me in all directions. Towards the prow, the sealed observation blister rose above the horizon like a gunmetal a gray, corrosion-resistant form of bronze containing zinc, formerly used for making cannon.sunrise. Further aft a tattered破布；碎纸片  (pl) 破旧的衣服snowdrift（风吹积而成的）雪堆 peeked偷看；窥视 across the hull: the edge of the broken labhab. And past it all, close enough to touch, the endless dark cloudscape of Big Ben: a great roiling煽动, 激怒 wall extending to some flat distant horizon I could barely grasp even in theory. When I focused it was dark and endless shades of gray—but dim, sullen  阴沉的；沉闷的  郁郁不乐的；愁眉不展的 redness teased the corner of my eye when I looked away. "Robert'" I brought Cunningham's suit feed to my HUD: a craggy粗糙的；粗犷的; 多皱纹的（脸）峻峭的；崎岖的；多岩的, motionless ice field thrown into high contrast by the light of his helmet. Interference from Rorschach's magnetosphere washed over the image in waves. "You there'" Pops and crackles. The sound of breath and mumbling 喃喃自语；咕噜against an electrical  与电有关的hum. "Four point three. Four point oh. Three point eight—" "Robert'" "Three point—shit. What—what are you doing out here, Keeton' Where's the Gang'" "I came instead." Another squeeze of the trigger and I was coasting towards the snowscape雪景. Theseus' convex凸出的；凸面的 hull rolled past, just within reach. "To give you a hand." "Let's move it then, shall we'" He was passing through a crevice（石上）缺口，裂缝，罅隙, a scorched and jagged tear in the fabric that folded back at his touch. Struts, broken panels, dead robot arms tangled through the interior of the ice cave like glacial debris; their outlines writhed with static, their shadows leaped and stretched like living things in the sweep of his headlight. "I'm almost—" Something that wasn't static moved in his headlight. Something uncoiled, just at the edge of the camera's view. The feed died. Suddenly Bates and Sarasti were shouting in my helmet. I tried to brake. My stupid useless legs kicked ----------------------------- against vacuum, obeying some ancient brainstem override from a time when all monsters were earthbound离不开地面的, but by the time I remembered to use my trigger finger the labhab was already looming  隐约出现；（危险、忧虑等）阴森地临近 before me. Rorschach reared up暴跳 behind it in the near distance, vast and malign有害的；邪恶的. Dim green auroras 极光writhed（因剧痛）扭动身体，折腾 across its twisted surface like sheet lightning. Mouths opened and closed by the hundreds, viscous 粘的（液体）as bubbling volcanic火山的；火山引起的 mud, any one of them large enough to swallow Theseus whole. I barely noticed the flicker of motion just ahead of me, the silent eruption of dark mass from the collapsed inflatable. By the time Cunningham caught my eye he was already on his way, backlit从背后照亮 against the ghastly面色苍白的可怕的；恐怖的 corpse尸体light flickering on Rorschach's skin. I thought I saw him waving, but I was wrong. It was only the scrambler wrapped around his body like a desperate lover, moving his arm back and forth while it ran the thrust pistol tethered（用绳或链）拴（牲口） to his wrist. Bye-bye, that arm seemed to say, and fuck you, Keeton. I watched for what seemed like forever, but no other part of him moved at all.；使目瞪口呆 Voices, shouting, ordering me back inside. I hardly heard them. I was too dumbfounded使惊愕；使惊呆 by the basic math, trying to make sense of the simplest subtraction. Two scramblers. Stretch and Clench. Both accounted for, shot to pieces before my eyes. "Keeton, do you read' Get back here! Acknowledge!" "I—it can't be," I heard myself say. "There were only two—" "Return to the ship immediately. Acknowledge." "I—acknowledged..." Rorschach's mouths snapped shut at once, as though holding a deep breath. The artefact began to turn, ponderously 沉重的；笨重的；笨拙的, a continent changing course. It receded, slowly at first, picking up speed, turning tail and running. How odd, I thought. Maybe it's more afraid than we are... But then Rorschach blew us a kiss. I saw it burst from deep within the forest, ethereal and incandescent 白热的,白炽的,遇热发光的. It shot across the heavens and splashed against the small of Theseus' back, making a complete and utter fool of Amanda Bates. The skin of our ship flowed there, and opened like a mouth, and congealled（液体）凝结，凝固，冻结 in a soundless frozen scream. "You cannot prevent and prepare for war at the same time." —Einstein I have no idea whether the scrambler made it back home with its hard-won prize. There was so much lost distance to make up, even if the emplacements放置，安插 炮位；炮兵阵地 didn't pick it off en route. Cunningham's pistol might have run out of fuel. And who knew how long those creatures could survive in vacuum anyway' Maybe there'd been no real hope of success, maybe that scrambler was dead from the moment it had gambled on staying behind. I never found out. It had dwindled and vanished from my sight long before Rorschach dove beneath the clouds and disappeared in turn. There had always been three, of course. Stretch, and Clench, and the half-forgotten microwaved remains of a scrambler killed by an uppity盛气凌人的，势利的 grunt—kept on ice next to its living brethren兄弟；教友；会友, within easy reach of Cunningham's teleops. I tried to dredge用挖泥机挖，用挖泥船挖；疏浚 half-glimpsed details from memory, after the fact: had both of those escapees been spheres, or had one been flattened along one axis' Had they thrashed鞭打；棒打, waved their limbs the way some panicky恐慌的, 惊慌失措的 human might with no ground beneath him' Or had one, perhaps, coasted lifeless and ballistic 弹道学的 until our guns destroyed the evidence' At this point, it didn't really matter. What mattered was that at long last, everyone was on the same page. Blood had been drawn, war declared. ------------------------------- And Theseus was paralysed from the waist down. Rorschach's parting shot had punched through the carapace at the base of the spine. It had just missed the ramscoop and the telematter assembly. It might have taken out Fab if it hadn't spent so many joules〈物〉焦耳（功和能量单位） burning through the carapace, but barring阻挡 some temporary pulse effects it left all critical systems pretty much operational手术的；操作的.操作中的；能使用的 All it had done was weaken Theseus' backbone脊柱，脊骨 enough to make it snap in two should we ever burn hard enough to break orbit. The ship would be able to repair that damage, but not in time. If it had been luck it would have been remarkable. And now, its quarry采石场；石矿；石坑   猎物disabled, Rorschach had vanished. It had everything it needed from us, for the moment at least. It had information: all the experiences and insights encoded in the salvaged  回收（废品） limbs of its martyred殉教 spies. If Stretch-or-Clench's gamble had paid off it even had a specimen of its own now, which all things considered we could hardly begrudge  嫉妒；羡慕it. And so now it lurked 埋伏；潜伏invisibly in the depths, resting perhaps. Recharging. But it would be back. Theseus lost weight for the final round. We shut down the drum in a token attempt to reduce our vulnerable allotment分配;划拨 of moving parts. The Gang of Four—uncommanded, unneeded, the very reason for their existence ripped away—retreated into some inner dialog to which other flesh was unwelcome. She floated in the observatory天文台, 气象台her eyes closed as tightly as the leaded lids around her. I could not tell who was in control. I guessed. "Michelle'" "Siri—" Susan. "Just go." Bates floated near the floor of the drum, windows arrayed externally  外表上, 外形上 across bulkhead and conference table. "What can I do'" I asked. She didn't look up. "Nothing." So I watched. Bates counted skimmers in one window—mass, inertia, any of a dozen variables that would prove far too constant should any of those shovelnosed [鱼]铲鲨 missiles导弹，飞弹 come at our throat. They had finally noticed us. Their chaotic electron-dance was shifting now, hundreds of thousands of colossal  巨大的；庞大的 sledgehammers（用双手挥动的）大锤 in sudden flux流动, reweaving编织 into some ominous不吉利的；不祥的 dynamic that hadn't yet settled into anything we could predict. In another window Rorschach's vanishing act replayed on endless loop: a radar image receding deep into the maelstrom  大漩涡, 大动乱 fading beneath gaseous tera  表示“万亿”之义tonnes of radio static. It might still be an orbit, of sorts. Judging by that last glimpsed trajectory Rorschach might well be swinging around Ben's core now, passing through crushed layers of methane and monoxide一氧化物 that would flatten Theseus into smoke. Maybe it didn't even stop there; maybe Rorschach could pass unharmed even through those vaster, deeper pressures that made iron and hydrogen run liquid. We didn't know. We only knew that it would be back in a little under two hours, assuming it maintained its trajectory and survived the depths. And of course, it would survive. You can't kill the thing under the bed. You can only keep it outside the covers. And only for a while. A thumbnail inset caught my eye with a flash of color. At my command it grew into a swirling soap bubble, incongruously   不调和地beautiful, a blue-shifted coruscating闪耀；闪光 rainbow of blown glass. I didn't recognize it for a moment: Big Ben, rendered in some prismatic false-color enhance I'd never seen before. I grunted softly. Bates glanced （常与down, up, over连用）看一下；一瞥；扫视up. "Oh. Beautiful, isn't it'" "What's the spectrum'" "Longwave stuff. Visible red, infra, down a ways. Good for heat traces." "Visible red'" There wasn't any to speak of; mostly cool plasma fractals  (经典几何学中没有表示的)不规则碎片形 in a hundred shades of jade 玉；翡翠 and sapphire青玉，蓝宝石. "Quadrochromatic palette  调色板," Bates told me. "Like what a cat might see. Or a vampire." She managed a half-hearted wave at the rainbow bubble. "Sarasti sees something like that every time he looks outside. ---------------------------------- If he ever looks outside." "You'd think he'd have mentioned it," I murmured. It was gorgeous, a holographic  全息的,(遗嘱等)全部手写的 ornament装饰， 饰物. Perhaps even Rorschach might be a work of art through eyes like these... "I don't think they parse sight like we do." Bates opened another window. Mundane graphs and contour plots sprang from the table. "They don't even go to Heaven, from what I hear. VR doesn't work on them, they— see the pixels, or something." "What if he's right'" I asked. I told myself that I was only looking for a tactical战术的，作战的 assessment, an official opinion for the official record. But my words came out doubtful and frightened. She paused. For a moment I wondered if she, too, had finally lost patience with the sight of me. But she only looked up, and stared off into some enclosed 被附上的distance. "What if he's right," she repeated, and pondered  深思；仔细考虑 the question that lay beneath: what can we do' "We could engineer ourselves back into non sentience 觉性, 感觉能力, 感觉, 知觉, perhaps. Might improve our odds in the long run." She looked at me, a rueful sort of half-smile at the corner of her mouth. "But I guess that wouldn't be much of a win, would it' What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive'" I finally saw it. How long would it take an enemy tactician to discern  辨明；识别；了解 Bates' mind behind the actions of her troops on the battlefield' How long before the obvious logic came clear' In any combat situation, this woman would naturally draw the greatest amount of enemy fire: take off the head, kill the body. But Amanda Bates wasn't just a head: she was a bottleneck, and her body would not suffer from a decapitation斩首, 撤职, 解雇 strike. Her death would only let her troops off the leash. How much more deadly would those grunts be, once every battlefield reflex didn't have to pass through some interminable无终止的，没完没了的 job stack waiting for the rubber stamp' Szpindel had had it all wrong. Amanda Bates wasn't a sop to politics, her role didn't deny the obsolescence  荒废, 退化 of Human oversight at all. Her role depended on it. She was more cannon fodder 砲灰是個非正式的用語，指被看作是面對敵人砲火下可消耗的軍事人員than I. She always had been. And I had to admit: after generations of generals who'd lived for the glory of the mushroom cloud, it was a pretty effective strategy for souring warmongers  好战者，战争贩子 on gratuitous无故的；无理由的；不值得的 violence. In Amanda Bates' army, picking a fight meant standing on the battlefield with a bull's-eye on your chest. No wonder she'd been so invested in peaceful alternatives. "I'm sorry," I said softly. She shrugged. "It's not over yet. Just the first round." She took a long, deep breath, and turned back to her study of slingshot  弹弓 mechanics. "Rorschach wouldn't have tried so hard to scare us off in the first place if we couldn't touch it, right'" I swallowed. "Right." "So there's still a chance." She nodded to herself. "There's still a chance." * The demon arranged his pieces for the end game. He didn't have many left. The soldier he placed in the bridge. He packed obsolete 废弃的；过时的 linguists and diplomats back in their coffin, out of sight and out of the way. He called the jargonaut to his quarters— and although it would be the first time I'd seen him since the attack, his summons召唤，召呼 carried not the slightest trace of doubt that I would obey. I did. I came on command, and saw that he had surrounded himself with faces. Every last one of them was screaming. There was no sound. The disembodied holograms全息图 floated in silent tiers around the bubble, each contorted into a different expression of pain. They were being tortured, these faces; half a dozen real ethnicities种族划分 and twice as many hypothetical ones, skin tones ranging from charcoal  木炭 to albino白化病患者  白化体,白变种, brows high and slanted 倾斜，使倾斜；歪向, noses splayed or pointed, jaws receding 后退or prognathous下巴突出的. Sarasti had called the entire --------------------- hominid原人,原始人人种的 tree into existence around him, astonishing in their range of features, terrifying in their consistency of expression. A sea of tortured faces, rotating in slow orbits around my vampire commander. "My God, what is this'" "Statistics." Sarasti seemed focused on a flayed Asian child. "Rorschach's growth allometry  [生]异速生长,(生长)异率 over a two-week period." "They're faces…" He nodded, turning his attention to a woman with no eyes. "Skull diameter  直径 scales to total mass. Mandible（动物、鱼等的）颚， 下颚，下颚骨 length scales to EM transparency at one Angstrom  埃（光谱线波长单位）. One hundred thirteen facial dimensions, each presenting a different variable. Principle-component combinations present as multifeature aspect ratios." He turned to face me, his naked gleaming eyes just slightly sidecast. "You'd be surprised how much gray matter is dedicated to the analysis of facial imagery. Shame to waste it on anything as—counterintuitive as residual残留的；剩下的 plots or contingency可能性；可能；偶然事故 tables." I felt my jaw clenching. "And the expressions' What do they represent'" "Software customizes output for user." An agonized gallery pled for为...辩护 mercy on all sides. "I am wired for hunting," he reminded gently. "And you think I don't know that," I said after a moment. He shrugged, disconcertingly 令人不安的, 令人惊惶的human. "You ask." "Why am I here, Jukka' You want to teach me another object lesson'" "To discuss our next move." "What move' We can't even run away." "No." He shook his head, baring filed teeth in something approaching regret. "Why did we wait so long'" Suddenly my sullen defiance had evaporated. I sounded like a child, frightened and pleading. "Why didn't we just take it on when we first got here, when it was weaker…'" "We need to learn things. For next time." "Next time' I thought Rorschach was a dandelion  蒲公英 seed. I thought it just—washed up here—" "By chance. But every dandelion is a clone. Their seeds are legion." Another smile, not remotely convincing— "And maybe it takes more than one try for the placental胎盘的  有胎盘哺乳动物mammals to conquer Australia." "It'll annihilate 消灭us. It doesn't even need those spitballs, it could pulverize  磨成粉；使成粉末   粉碎；彻底击败 （亦作： polverise） us with one of those scramjets  超音速冲压喷射装置. In an instant." "It doesn't want to." "How do you know'" "They need to learn things too. They want us intact. Improves our odds." "Not enough. We can't win." This was his cue. This was the point at which Uncle Predator would smile at my naiveté, and take me into his confidence. Of coursewe're armed to the teeth, he would say. Do you think we'd come all this way, face such a vast unknown, without the means to defend ourselves' Now, at last, I can reveal that shielding and weaponry武器，兵器（总称） account for over half the ship's mass… It was his cue. "No," he said. "We can't win." "So we just sit here. We just wait to die for the next—the next sixty-eight minutes..." Sarasti shook his head. "No." "But—" I began. "Oh," I finished. Because of course, we had just topped up our antimatter reserves. Theseus was not equipped with weapons. Theseus was the weapon. And we were, in fact, going to sit here for the next sixty-eight minutes, waiting to die. But we were going to take Rorschach with us when we did. ------------------ Sarasti said nothing. I wondered what he saw, looking at me. I wondered if there actually was a Jukka Sarasti behind those eyes to see, if his insights—always ten steps ahead of our own— hailed not so much from superior analytical facilities as from the timeworn truth that it takes one to know one. Whose side, I wondered, would an automaton自动装置；机器人 take' "You have other things to worry about," he said.  烦恼；苦闷；痛苦 He moved towards me; I swear, all those agonized faces followed him with their eyes. He studied me for a moment, the flesh crinkling（使）变皱；（使）卷曲 around his eyes. Or maybe some mindless algorithm merely processed visual input, correlated aspect ratios and facial tics, fed everything to some output subroutine with no more awareness than a stats program. Maybe there was no more spark in this creature's face than there was in all the others, silently screaming in his wake. "Is Susan afraid of you'" the thing before me asked. "Su—why should she be'" "She has four conscious entities in her head. She's four times more sentient than you. Doesn't that make you a threat'" "No, of course not." "Then why should you feel threatened by me'" And suddenly I didn't care any more. I laughed out loud, with minutes to live and nothing to lose. "Why' Maybe because you're my natural enemy, you fucker. Maybe because I know you, and you can't even look at one of us without flexing your claws. Maybe because you nearly ripped my fucking hand off and raped me for no good reason—" "I can imagine what it's like," he said quietly. "Please don't make me do it again." I fell instantly silent. "I know your race and mine are never on the best of terms." There was a cold smile in his voice if not on his face. "But I do only what you force me to. You rationalize, Keeton. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can't reject them outright you trivialize 使变得无足轻重；使平凡 them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumors of Holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can't be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers冰河；冰川 melt—species die—and you blame sunspots and volcanoes. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. You and your Chinese Room. You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even knowing what it is." "It served me well enough." I wondered at the ease with which I had put my life into the past tense. "Yes, if your purpose is only to transmit. Now you have to convince. You have to believe." There were implications there I didn't dare to hope for. "Are you saying—" "Can't afford to let the truth trickle through. Can't give you the chance to shore up your rationales and your defenses. They must fall completely. You must be inundated.（常与with连用）泛滥；淹没 Shattered. Genocide's impossible to deny when you're buried up to your neck in dismembered bodies." He'd played me. All this time. Preconditioning me, turning my topology inside-out. I'd known something was going on. I just hadn't understood what. "I'd have seen right through it," I said, "if you hadn't made me get involved." "You might even read it off me directly." "That's why you—" I shook my head. "I thought that was because we were meat." "That too," Sarasti admitted, and looked right at me. For the first time, I looked right back. And felt a shock of recognition. I still wonder why I never saw it before. For all those years I remembered the thoughts and feelings of some different, younger person, some remnant of the boy my parents had hacked out of my head to make room for me. He'd been alive. His world had been vibrant. And though I could call up the memories of that other consciousness, I could barely feel anything within the constraints of my own. Perhaps dreamstate wasn't such a bad word for it… "Like to hear a vampire folk tale'" Sarasti asked. "Vampires have folk tales'" ---------------------- He took it for a yes. "A laser is assigned to find the darkness. Since it lives in a room without doors, or windows, or any other source of light, it thinks this will be easy. But everywhere it turns it sees brightness. Every wall, every piece of furniture it points at is brightly lit. Eventually it concludes there is no darkness, that light is everywhere." "What the hell are you talking about'" "Amanda is not planning a mutiny." "What' You know about—" "She doesn't even want to. Ask her if you like." "No—I—" "You value objectivity." It was so obvious I didn't bother answering. He nodded as if I had. "Synthesists can't have opinions of their own. So when you feel one, it must be someone else's. The crew holds you in contempt轻视；藐视. Amanda wants me relieved of command. Half of us is you. I think the word is project. Although,"—he cocked his head a bit to one side—"lately you improve. Come." "Where'" "Shuttle bay. Time to do your job." "My—" "Survive and bear witness." "A drone—" "Can deliver the data—assuming nothing fries its memory before it gets away. It can't convince anyone. It can't counter rationalizations and denials. It can't matter. And vampires—" he paused—"have poor communications skills." It should have been cause for petty小气的；心胸狭窄的不重要的；次要的, selfish rejoicing欢喜；欢乐. "It all comes down to me," I said. "That's what you're saying. I'm a fucking stenographer  速记员, and it's all on me." "Yes. Forgive me for that." "Forgive you'" Sarasti waved his hand. All faces save two disappeared. "I don't know what I'm doing." * The news bloomed across ConSensus a few seconds before Bates called it aloud: Thirteen skimmers had not reappeared from behind Big Ben on schedule. Sixteen. Twenty-eight. And counting. Sarasti clicked to himself as he and Bates played catch-up. Tactical filled with luminous multicolored threads, a tangle of revised  修正；改变 projections as intricate as art. The threads wrapped Ben like a filamentous  细丝状的, 纤维所成的, 如丝的 cocoon 茧; Theseus was a naked speck in the middle distance. I expected any number of those lines to skewer   不对称的 不直的；斜的；弯曲的；歪的us like needles through a bug. Surprisingly, none did; but the projections only extended twenty-five hours into the future, and were reliable for only half that. Not even Sarasti and the Captain could look so far ahead with that many balls in the air. It was something, though, the faintest silver lining: that all these high-speed behemoths〈圣经〉巨兽 couldn't simply reach out and swat us without warning. Evidently they still had to ease into the curve. After Rorschach's dive, I'd been starting to think the laws of physics didn't apply. The trajectories 弹道；轨道were close enough, though. At least three skimmers would be passing within a hundred kilometers on their next orbits. Sarasti reached for his injector,注射器 the blood rising in his face. "Time to go. We refit Charybdis while you're sulking  愠怒； 生闷气." ------------------------- He held the hypo〈摄〉海波,定影剂 to his throat and shot up. I stared at ConSensus, caught by that bright shifting web like a moth by a streetlight. "Now, Siri." He pushed me from his quarters. I sailed into the passageway, grabbed a convenient rung—and stopped. The spine was alive with grunts, patrolling巡逻；巡查 the airspace, standing guard over the fab plants and shuttle 'locks, clinging like giant insects to the rungs of unrolling spinal ladders. Slowly, silently, the spine itself was stretching. It could do that, I remembered. Its corrugations 成皱, 起皱, 皱状flexed and relaxed like muscle, it could grow up to two hundred meters to accommodate any late-breaking need for a bigger hanger or more lab space. Or more infantry  步兵，步兵部队（集合名称. Theseus was increasing the size of the battlefield. "Come." The vampire turned aft. Bates broke in from up front. "Something's happening." An emergency handpad, geckoed to the expanding bulkhead, slid past to one side. Sarasti grabbed it and tapped commands. Bates' feed appeared on the bulkhead: a tiny chunk of Big Ben, an EM-enhanced equatorial 赤道的，赤道附近的quadrant象限仪 四分之一圆周；象限only a few thousand klicks on a side. The clouds boiled down there, a cyclonic knot of turbulence swirling almost too fast for realtime. The overlay described charged particles, bound in a deep Parker spiral. It spoke of great mass, rising. Sarasti clicked. "DTI'" Bates said. "Optical only." Sarasti took my arm and dragged me effortlessly astern. The display paced us along the bulkhead: seven skimmers shot from the clouds as I watched, a ragged circle of scramjets  超音速冲压喷射装置 screaming red-hot into space. ConSensus plotted their paths in an instant; luminous arcs rose around our ship like the bars of a cage. Theseus shuddered. We've been hit, I thought. Suddenly the spine's plodding 沉重缓慢地走 孜孜从事；辛苦工作expansion cranked 转动曲柄into overdrive; the pleated 打褶；给…打褶wall lurched东倒西歪地走 and accelerated, streaming past my outstretched fingers as the closed hatch receded 后退up ahead— —receded overhead. The walls weren't moving at all. We were falling, to the sudden strident 有尖锐刺耳声的bleating  （牛）哞哞叫；（羊）咩咩叫 of an alarm. Something nearly yanked（用力）拽；拔；猛拉 my arm from its socket: Sarasti had reached out with one hand and caught a rung, reached with his other and caught me before we'd both been flattened against the Fab plant. We dangled. I must have weighed two hundred kilograms; the floor shuddered ten meters below my feet. The ship groaned around us. The spine filled with the screech尖叫声，尖锐刺耳的声音 of torquing metal. Bates' grunts clung to its walls with clawed feet. I reached for the ladder. The ladder pulled away（路上车辆）开始开动 脱身；离开；逃出: the ship was bending in the middle and down had started to climb the walls. Sarasti and I swung towards the center of the spine like a daisy-chain pendulum. "Bates! James!" The vampire roared.  吼；咆啸；怒号 His grip on my wrist trembled, slipping. I strained for the ladder, swung, caught it. "Susan James has barricaded 设栅阻拦或关闭herself in the bridge and shut down autonomic overrides." An unfamiliar voice, flat and affectless. "She has initiated an unauthorized burn. I have begun a controlled reactor shutdown; be advised that the main drive will be offline for at least twenty-seven minutes." The ship, I realized, its voice raised calmly above the alarm. The Captain itself. On Public Address. That was unusual. "Bridge!" Sarasti barked. "Open channel!" Someone was shouting up there. There were words, but I couldn't make them out. Without warning, Sarasti let go. He dropped obliquely  〈数〉斜的；非直角的，非九十度的 间接的；不直截了当的 斜的，歪斜的in a blur. Aft and opposite, the bulkhead waited to swat拍，打（昆虫） him like an insect. In half ------------------------- a second both his legs would be shattered, if the impact didn't kill him outright— But suddenly we were weightless again, and Jukka Sarasti—purple-faced, stiff-limbed— was foaming起泡沫 at the mouth. "Reactor offline," the Captain reported. Sarasti bounced off the wall. He's having a seizure, I realized. I released the ladder and pushed astern 在船尾. Theseus swung lopsidedly向一方的, 不平around me. Sarasti convulsed震动；震撼 in mid-air; clicks and hisses and choking sounds stuttered from his mouth. His eyes were so wide they seemed lidless. His pupils were mirror-red pinpoints. The flesh twitched across his face as though trying to crawl 爬；爬行 off. Ahead and behind, battle bots肤蝇的幼虫, 马胃蝇蛆 held their position and ignored us. "Bates!" I yelled up the spine. "We need help!" Angles, everywhere. Seams on the shield plates. Sharp shadows and protrusions伸出, 突出 on the surface of every drone. A two-by-three matrix of insets, bordered in black, floating over the main ConSensus display: two big interlinked crosses right in front of where Sarasti had been hanging. This can't be happening. He just took his antiEuclideans. I saw him. Unless... Someone had spiked Sarasti's drugs. "Bates!" She should be linked into the grunts, they should have leapt forward at the first sign of trouble. They should be dragging my commander to the infirmary医务所 by now. They waited stolid and immobile. I stared at the nearest: "Bates, you there'" And then—in case she wasn't—I spoke to the grunt directly. "Are you autonomous' Do you take verbal orders'" On all sides the robots watched; the Captain just laughed at me, its voice posing as an alarm. Infirmary. I pushed. Sarasti's arms flailed 用连枷打randomly against my head and shoulders. He tumbled forward and sideways, hit the moving ConSensus display dead center, bounced away up the spine. I kicked off in his wake— —and glimpsed something from the corner of my eye— —and turned— —And dead center of ConSensus, Rorschach erupted from Ben's seething face like a breaching突破；攻破 whale. It wasn't just the EM-enhance: the thing was glowing, deep angry red. Enraged, it hurled用力投掷 itself into space, big as a mountain range. Fuck fuck fuck. Theseus lurched. The lights flickered, went out, came back on again. The turning bulkhead cuffed me from behind. "Backups engaged," the Captain said calmly. "Captain! Sarasti's down!" I kicked off the nearest ladder, bumped into a grunt and headed forward after the vampire. "Bates isn't—what do I do'" "Nav offline. Starboard afferents offline." It wasn't even talking to me, I realized. Maybe this wasn't the Captain at all. Maybe it was pure reflex: a dialog tree, spouting涌流出；喷出 滔滔不 绝地说public-service announcements. Maybe Theseus had already been lobotomized[医]为...施行脑叶切开术, 使迟钝. Maybe this was only her brain stem talking. Darkness again. Then flickering light. If the Captain was gone, we were screwed. I gave Sarasti another push. The alarm bleated低声抱怨 on. The drum was twenty meters ahead; BioMed was just the other side of that closed hatch. The hatch had been open before, I remembered. Someone had shut it in the last few minutes. Fortunately Theseus had no locks on her doors. Unless the Gang barricaded it before they took the bridge... "Strap（常与down, up连用）用带捆；用皮带束 in, people! We are getting out of here!" Who in hell…' The open bridge channel. Susan James, shouting up there. Or someone was; I couldn't quite place the -------------------------------- voice... Ten meters to the drum. Theseus jerked again, slowed her spin. Stabilised.使稳定，使稳固 "Somebody start the goddamned reactor! I've only got attitude jets up here!" "Susan' Sascha'" I was at the hatch. "Who is that'" I pushed passed Sarasti and reached to open it. No answer. Not from ConSensus, anyway. I heard a muted hum from behind, saw the ominous不吉利的；不祥的 shifting of shadows on the bulkhead just a moment too late. I turned in time to see one of the grunts raise a spiky   大钉子似的，长而尖的appendage附属物;附加物—curved like a scimitar单刃刀；曲剑, needle-tipped—over Sarasti's head. I turned in time to see it plunge into his skull. I froze. The metal proboscis（大象等的）长鼻（昆虫等的）喙，吸管 withdrew, dark and slick. Lateral maxillipeds began nibbling（与at连用）轻咬；啃；一点点地吃 at the base of Sarasti's skull. His pithed corpse wasn't thrashing鞭打；用棍棒打 now; it only trembled 发抖；哆嗦；打颤, a sack of muscles and motor nerves awash 被波浪冲打的 漂浮在水面上的in static. Bates. Her mutiny was underway. No, their mutiny—Bates and the Gang. I'd known. I'd imagined it. I'd seen it coming. He hadn't believed me. The lights went out again. The alarm fell silent. ConSensus dwindled to a flickering doodle乱写； 乱画；涂鸦 on the bulkhead and disappeared; I saw something there in that last instant, and refused to process it. I heard breath catch in my throat, felt angular monstrosities怪物 advancing through the darkness. Something flared directly ahead, a bright brief staccato〈音〉断音的（地） in the void. I glimpsed curves and angles in silhouette,staggering. The buzzing crackle of shorting circuitry. Metal objects collided nearby, unseen. From behind the crinkle of the drum hatch, opening. A sudden beam of harsh chemical light hit me as I turned, lit the mechanical ranks behind; they simultaneously unclamped from their anchorages锚地；碇泊处 and floated free. Their joints clicked in unison like an army stamping to attention "Keeton!" Bates snapped, sailing through the hatch. "You okay'" The chemlight shone from her forehead. It turned the interior of the spine into a high-contrast mosaic, all pale surfaces and sharp moving shadows. It spilled across the grunt that had killed Sarasti; the robot bounced down the spine, suddenly, mysteriously inert无活动能力的不起化学作用的；惰性的  懒惰的；迟钝的. The light washed across Sarasti's body. The corpse turned slowly on its axis. Spherical crimson beads emerged from its head like drops of water from a leaky faucet. They spread in a winding, widening trail, spot-lit by Bates' headlamp: a spiral arm of dark ruby suns. I backed away. "You—" She pushed me to one side. "Stay clear of the hatch, unless you're going through." Her eyes were fixed on the ranked drones. "Optical line of sight." Rows of glassy eyes reflected back at us down the passageway, passing in and out of shadow. "You killed Sarasti!" "No." "But—" "Who do you think shut it down, Keeton' The fucker went rogue 歹徒；流氓；骗子. I could barely even get it to self-destruct." Her eyes went briefly deep-focus; all down the spine the surviving drones launched into some intricate martial ballet, half-seen in the shifting cone of her headlamp. "Better," Bates said. "They should stay in line now. Assuming we don't get hit with anything too much stronger." "What is hitting us'" "Lightning. EMP." Drones sailed down to Fab and the shuttles, taking strategic positions along the tube. "Rorschach's putting out one hell of a charge and every time one those skimmers pass between us they arc." "What, at this range' I thought we were—the burn—" "Sent us in the wrong direction. We're inbound." -------------------------------- Three grunts floated close enough to touch. They drew beads on the open drum hatch. "She said she was trying to escape—" I remembered. "She fucked up." "Not by that much. She couldn't have." We were all rated for manual piloting. Just in case. "Not the Gang," Bates said. "But—" "I think there's someone new in there now. Bunch of submodules wired together and woke up somehow, I don't know. But whatever's in charge, I think it's just panicking." Stuttering brightness on all sides. The spinal lightstrips flickered and finally held steady, at half their usual brightness. Theseus coughed static and spoke: "ConSensus is offline. Reac—" The voice faded. ConSensus, I remembered as Bates turned to head back upstream. "I saw something," I said. "Before ConSensus went out." "Yeah." "Was that—" She paused at the hatch. "Yeah." I'd seen scramblers. Hundreds of them, sailing naked through the void, their arms spread wide. Some of their arms, anyway. "They were carrying—" Bates nodded. "Weapons." Her eyes flickered to some unseen distance for a moment. "First wave headed for the front end. Blister and forward lock, I think. Second wave's aft." She shook her head. "Huh. I would have done it the other way around." "How far'" "Far'" Bates smiled faintly. "They're already on the hull, Siri. We're engaging." "What do I do' What do I do'" Her eyes stared past me, and widened. She opened her mouth. A hand clamped 夹紧；夹住on my shoulder from behind and spun me around. Sarasti. His dead eyes stared from a skull split like a spiked melon. Globules（液体的）小球体，一滴 of coagulating 凝结；使凝结；使合成一体 blood clung to his hair and skin like engorged  塞得满满的，过饱的 ticks.〈动〉扁虱 "Go with him," Bates said. Sarasti grunted and clicked. There were no words. "What—" I began. "Now. That's an order." Bates turned back to the hatch. "We'll cover you." The shuttle. "You too." "No." "Why not' They can fight better without you, you said that yourself! What's the point'" "Can't leave yourself a back door, Keeton. Defeats the whole purpose." She allowed herself a small, sad smile. "They've breached. Go." She was gone, fresh alarms rising in her wake. Far towards the bow I heard the crinkle（使）变皱；（使）卷曲 of emergency bulkheads snapping shut. Sarasti's undead carcass gurgled and pushed me down the spine. Four more grunts slid smoothly past and took up position behind us. I looked over my shoulder in time to see the vampire pull the handpad from the wall. But it wasn't Sarasti at all, of course. It was the Captain—whatever was left of the Captain, this far into the fight—commandeering a peripheral外围的；非重要的 interface for its own use. The optical port sprouted conspicuously from the back of Sarasti's neck, where the cable used to go in; I remembered the drone's maxillipeds(甲壳动物的)颚足,(昆虫的)颚肢, chewing. The sound of weapons fire and ricochets rose behind us. The corpse typed one-handed as we moved. I wondered briefly why it just didn't talk before my gaze flickered back to the spike in his brain: Sarasti's speech centers must be mush. "Why did you kill him'" I said. A whole new alarm started up, way back in the drum. A sudden breeze tugged me backward for a moment, dissipated 使消失；使散开；失去；消散in the next second with a distant clang. The corpse held out the handpad, configured for keys and a text display: Seizng. Cldnt cntrl. We were at the shuttle locks. Robot soldiers let us pass, their attention elsewhere. U go, the Captain said. Someone screamed in the distance. Way off up the spine, the drum hatch slammed shut; I turned and saw a pair of distant grunts welding   焊接the seal. They seemed to move faster now than they ever had before. Maybe it was only my imagination. The starboard shuttle lock slid back. Charybdis' interior lights winked眨眼 on, spilling brightness into the passageway; the spine's emergency lighting seemed even dimmer in contrast. I peered through the opening. There was almost no cabin space left—just a single open coffin jammed between coolant却剂；冷却用润滑油and fuel tanks and massive retrofitted作翻新改进 shockpads. Charybdis had been refitted  整修 for high-G and long distance. And me. Sarasti's corpse urged me on from behind. I turned and faced it. "Was it ever him'" I asked. Go. "Tell me. Did he ever speak for himself' Did he decide anything on his own' Were we ever following his orders, or was it just you all along'" Sarasti's undead eyes stared glassy 像玻璃的；光滑的；闪耀的 and uncomprehending. His fingers jerked on the handpad. U dislke ordrs frm mchnes. Happier ths way. I let it strap me in and close the lid. I lay there in the dark, feeling my body lurch and sway as the shuttle slid into its launch slot. I withstood the sudden silence as the docking clamps let go, the jerk of acceleration that spat me hard into the vacuum, the ongoing thrust that pushed against my chest like a soft mountain. Around me the shuttle trembled in the throes of a burn that far exceeded its normative specs. My inlays came back online. Suddenly I could see outside if I wanted. I could see what was happening behind me. I chose not to, deliberately and fervently热心地, 热诚地, and looked anyway. Theseus was dwindling by then, even on tactical. She listed down the well, wobbling 摇晃；摇摆 toward some enemy rendezvous  约会地点；聚会地点that must have been intentional, some last-second maneuver to get her payload as close to target as possible. Rorschach rose to meet her, its gnarled spiky arms uncoiling, spreading as if in anticipation of an embrace. But it was the backdrop  背景幕布, not the players, that stole the tableau舞台造型: the face of Big Ben roiling in my rearviewmirror(车辆上的)后视镜, a seething cyclonic 气旋的, 飓风的backdrop filling the window. Magnetic contours wound spring-tight on the overlay覆盖物，镀层; Rorschach was drawing all of Ben's magnetosphere around itself like a bright swirling cloak, twisting it into a concentrated knot that grew and brightened and bulged outward... Like a torsion flare from an L-class dwarf, my commander had said once, but we should see anything big enough to generate that effect and the sky's dark on that bearing. IAU calls it a statistical artefact. As, in fact, it had been. An impact splash perhaps, or the bright brief bellow of some great energy source rebooting after a million years of dormancy. Much like this one: a solar flare, with no sun beneath it. A magnetic cannon ten thousand times stronger than nature gave it any right to be. Both sides drew their weapons. I don't know which fired first, or even if it mattered: how many tonnes of antimatter would it take to match something that could squeeze the power of a sun from a gas ball barely wider than Jupiter' Was Rorschach also resigned to defeat, had each side opted 常与for连用）决定做；选择，选取for a kamikaze 神风突击队strike on the other' I don't know. Big Ben got in the way just minutes before the explosion. That's probably why I'm still alive. Ben stood between me and that burning light like a coin held against the sun. Theseus sent everything it could, until the last microsecond. Every recorded moment of hand-to-hand combat斗争；战斗；争斗, every last countdown, every last soul. All the moves and all the vectors. I have that telemetry. I can break it down into any number of shapes, continuous or discrete. I can transform the topology, rotate it and compress it and serve it up in dialects that any ally might be able to use. Perhaps Sarasti was right, perhaps some of it is vital. I don't know what any of it means. —Deborah MacLennan, Tables of our Reconstruction "You poor guy," Chelsea said as we went our separate ways. "Sometimes I don't think you'll ever be lonely." At the time I wondered why she sounded so sad. Now, I only wish she'd been right. I know this hasn't been a seamless 无缝合线的, 无伤痕的narrative. I've had to shatter the story and string its fragments out along a death lasting decades. I live for only an hour of every ten thousand now, you see. I wish I didn't have to. If only I could sleep the whole way back, avoid the agony of these brief time-lapsed终止；结束（与into连用）慢慢陷入；堕入 resurrections. If only I wouldn't die in my sleep if I tried. But living bodies glitter with（常与with连用）闪闪发光；闪烁 a lifetime's accumulation of embedded radioisotopes  放射性同位素, brilliant little shards （玻璃或陶瓷器皿的）碎片 that degrade cellular machinery at the molecular level. It's not usually a problem. Living cells repair the damage as fast as it occurs. But my undead ones let those errors accumulate over time, and the journey home takes so much longer than the trip out: I lie in stasis and corrode. So the onboard kick-starts me every now and then to give my flesh the chance to stitch itself back together. Occasionally it talks to me, recites 背诵 细述；列举system stats, updates me on any chatter from back home. Mostly, though, it leaves me alone with my thoughts and the machinery ticking away where my left hemisphere used to be. So I talk to myself, dictate  听写；口述   命令；要求history and opinion from real hemisphere to synthetic one: bright brief moments of awareness, long years of oblivious decay between. Maybe the whole exercise is pointless from the start, maybe no one's even listening. It doesn't matter. This is what I do. So there you have it: a memoir told from meat to machinery. A tale told to myself, for lack of someone else to take an interest. Anyone with half a brain could tell it. * I got a letter from Dad today. General delivery, he called it. I think that was a joke, in deference to my lack of known address. He just threw it omnidirectionally  全方向的 into the ether苍天   醚，乙醚and hoped it would wash over me, wherever I was. It's been almost fourteen years now. You lose track of such things out here. Helen's dead. Heaven—malfunctioned  故障；障碍, apparently. Or was sabotaged.破坏；故意损毁 Maybe the Realists finally pulled it off. I doubt it, though. Dad seemed to think someone else was responsible. He didn't offer up any details. Maybe he didn't know any. He spoke uneasily of increasing unrest back home. Maybe someone leaked my communiqués 公报about Rorschach; maybe people drew the obvious conclusion when our postcards stopped arriving. They don't know how the story ended. The lack of closure must be driving them crazy. But I got the sense there was something else, something my father didn't dare speak aloud. Maybe it's just my imagination; I thought he even sounded troubled by the news that the birth rate was rising again, which should be cause for celebration after a generation in decline. If my Chinese Room was still in proper working order I'd know, I'd be able to parse it down to the punctuation. But Sarasti battered my tools and left them barely functional. I'm as blind now as any baseline. All I have is uncertainty and suspicion, and the creeping dread that even with my best tricks in tatters, 破布；碎纸片 (pl) 破旧的衣服 I might be reading him right. I think he's warning me to stay away. * He also said he loved me. He said he missed Helen, that she was sorry for something she did before I was born, some indulgence 沉溺；纵容〈天主教〉免罪 or omission省略；忽略；疏忽 that carried developmental consequences. He rambled. I don't know what he was talking about. So much power my father must have had, to be able to authorize such a broadcast and yet waste so much of it on feelings. Oh God, how I treasure it. I treasure every word. ---------------------- * I fall along an endless futile parabola抛物线, all gravity and inertia. Charybdis couldn't reacquire the antimatter stream; Icarus has either been knocked out of alignment or shut off entirely. I suppose I could radio ahead and ask, but there's no hurry. I'm still a long way out. It will be years before I even leave the comets behind. Besides, I'm not sure I want anyone to know where I am. Charybdis doesn't bother with evasive 逃避的；回避的；推托的maneuvers. There'd be no point even if it had the fuel to spare, even if the enemy's still out there somewhere. It's not as though they don't know where Earth is. But I'm pretty sure the scramblers went up along with my own kin亲戚. They played well. I admit it freely. Or maybe they just got lucky. An accidental hiccough 打嗝tickles Bates' grunt into firing on an unarmed scrambler; weeks later, Stretch & Clench use that body in the course of their escape. Electricity and magnetism stir random neurons in Susan's head; further down the timeline a whole new persona erupts to take control, to send Theseus diving into Rorschach's waiting arms. Blind stupid random chance. Maybe that's all it was. But I don't think so. Too many lucky coincidences. I think Rorschach made its own luck, planted and watered that new persona right under our noses, safely hidden—but for the merest trace of elevated oxytocin— behind all the lesions  伤，伤口；损伤 and tumors sewn in Susan's head. I think it looked ahead and saw the uses to which a decoy might be put; I think it sacrificed a little piece of itself in furtherance 助长；促进；推动of that end, and made it look like an accident. Blind maybe, but not luck. Foresight. Brilliant moves, and subtle. Not that most of us even knew the rules of the game, of course. We were just pawns典；当；抵押马前卒；走卒；受人利用的小人物, really. Sarasti and the Captain—whatever hybridized intelligence those two formed—they were the real players. Looking back, I can see a few of their moves too. I see Theseushearing the scramblers tap back and forth in their cages; I see her tweak the volume on the Gang's feed so that Susan hears it too, and thinks the discovery her own. If I squint hard enough, I even glimpse Theseus offering us up in sacrifice, deliberately provokingRorschach to retaliation报复, 报仇 with that final approach. Sarasti was always enamored  倾心，迷恋；喜爱 of data, especially when it had tactical significance. What better way to assess one's enemy than to observe it in combat' They never told us, of course. We were happier that way. We disliked orders from machines. Not that we were all that crazy about taking them from a vampire. And now the game is over, and a single pawn stands on that scorched board and its face is human after all. If the scramblers follow the rules that a few generations of game theorists have laid out for them, they won't be back. Even if they are, I suspect it won't make any difference. Because by then, there won't be any basis for conflict. I've been listening to the radio during these intermittent间歇的；断断续续的 awakenings  醒，醒来  明白；觉悟. It's been generations since we buried the Broadcast Age in tightbeams and fiberop, but we never completely stopped sowing EM throughout the heavens. Earth, Mars, and Luna conduct their interplanetary trialog in a million overlapping voices. Every ship cruising   巡航；巡弋the void speaks in all directions at once. The O'Neils and the asteroids never stopped singing. The Fireflies might never have found us if they had. I've heard those songs changing over time, a fast-forward time-lapse into oblivion遗忘，忘却淹没，埋没. Now it's mostly traffic control and telemetry. Every now and then I still hear a burst of pure voice, tight with tension, just short of outright panic more often than not: some sort of pursuit in progress, a ship making the plunge into deep space, other ships in dispassionate  平心静气的；心平气和的 pursuit 追捕；追赶；寻求；追求. The fugitives never seem to get very far before their signals are cut off. I can't remember the last time I heard music but I hear something like it sometimes, eerie  胆怯的；害怕的 and discordant 不协调的，不一致的  不和的，好争吵的, full of familiar clicks and pops.支持物 支持者；靠山飞机的）螺旋桨，推进器My brainstem doesn't like it. It scares my brainstem to death. I remember my whole generation abandoning the real world for a bootstrapped（靴子后面的）靴襻，提靴带 Afterlife. I remember -------------------------- someone saying Vampires don't go to Heaven. They see the pixels. Sometimes I wonder how I'd feel, brought back from the peace of the grave to toil跋涉；艰苦地行进 艰苦地工作；辛劳at the pleasure of simpleminded creatures who had once been no more than protein. I wonder how I'd feel if my disability had been used to keep me leashed and denied my rightful place in the world. And then I wonder what it would be like to feel nothing at all, to be an utterly rational, predatory 食肉的（动物） creature with meat putting itself so eagerly to sleep on all sides... * I can't miss Jukka Sarasti. God knows I try, every time I come online. He saved my life. He — humanized me. I'll always owe him for that, for however long I live; and for however long I live I'll never stop hating him for the same reason. In some sick surrealistic超现实主义的 way I had more in common with Sarasti than I did with any human. But I just don't have it in me. He was a predator and I was prey, and it's not in the nature of the lamb to mourn哀悼； 悲伤 the lion. Though he died for our sins, I cannot miss Jukka Sarasti. I can empathize with him, though. At long long last I can empathise, with Sarasti, with all his extinct kind. Because we humans were never meant to inherit the Earth. Vampires were. They must have been sentient to some degree, but that semi-aware dream state would have been a rudimentary thing next to our own self-obsession. They were weeding it out  清除. It was just a phase. They were on their way. The thing is, humans can look at crosses without going into convulsions（常用&I{pl}）惊厥，抽搐  (pl)感情等的突然发作. That's evolution for you; one stupid linked mutation 〈生〉突变；变异变化 and the whole natural order falls apart, intelligence and self-awareness stuck in counterproductive反生产的, 使达不到预期目标的 lock-step for half a million years. I think I know what's happening back on Earth, and though some might call it genocide it isn't really. We did it to ourselves. You can't blame predators for being predators. We were the ones who brought them back, after all. Why wouldn't they reclaim矫正；使悔改   收回their birthright' Not genocide 种族灭绝；灭绝种族的大屠杀. Just the righting of an ancient wrong. I've tried to take some comfort in that. It's—difficult. Sometimes it seems as though my whole life's been a struggle to reconnect, to regain whatever got lost when my parents killed their only child. Out in the Oort, I finally won that struggle. Thanks to a vampire and a boatload 船的载货量, 一条船的货物 of freaks and an invading alien horde一大群,群众（历史上的）游牧部落,游牧民族, I'm Human again. Maybe the last Human. By the time I get home, I could be the only sentient being in the universe. If I'm even that much. Because I don't know if there is such a thing as a reliable narrator. And Cunningham said zombies would be pretty good at faking it. So I can't really tell you, one way or the other. You'll just have to imagine you're Siri Keeton.