Blindsight

"We are here to explore," replied the Gang, although their voice was pure Theseus. "Request dialog with agents who sent objects into near-solar space."

"First contact. Sounds like something to celebrate."

I double-checked the source. No, this wasn't a translation; this was the actual unprocessed signal coming from—Rorschach, it had called itself. Part of the signal, anyway; there were other elements, nonacoustic ones, encoded in the beam.

I browsed them while James said, "Request information about your celebration": standard ship-to-ship handshaking protocols.

"You're interested." The voice was stronger now, younger.

"Yes."

"You are?"

"Yes," the Gang repeated patiently.

"You are?"

The slightest hesitation. "This is Theseus."

"I know that, baseline." In Mandarin, now. "Who are you?"

No obvious change in the harmonics. Somehow, though, the voice seemed to have acquired an edge.

"This is Susan James. I am a—"

"You wouldn't be happy here, Susan. Fetishistic religious beliefs involved. There are dangerous observances."

James chewed her lip.

"Request clarification. Are we in danger from these observances?"

"You certainly could be."

"Request clarification. Is it the observances that are dangerous, or the low-orbit environment?"

"The environment of the disturbances. You should pay attention, Susan. Inattention connotes indifference," Rorschach said.

"Or disrespect," it added after a moment.

* * *

We had four hours before Ben got in the way. Four hours of uninterrupted nonstop communication made vastly easier than anyone had expected. It spoke our language, after all. Repeatedly it expressed polite concern for our welfare. And yet, for all its facility with Human speech it told us very little. For four hours it managed to avoid giving a straight answer on any subject beyond the extreme inadvisability of closer contact, and by the time it fell into eclipse we still didn't know why.

Sarasti dropped onto the deck halfway through the exchange, his feet never touching the stairs. He reached out and grabbed a railing to steady himself on landing, and staggered only briefly. If I'd tried that I'd have ended up bouncing along the deck like a pebble in a cement mixer.

He stood still as stone for the rest of the session, face motionless, eyes hidden behind his onyx visor. When Rorschach's signal faded in midsentence he assembled us around the Commons table with a gesture.

"It talks," he said.

James nodded. "It doesn't say much, except for asking us to keep our distance. So far the voice has manifested as adult male, although the apparent age changed a few times."

He'd heard all that. "Structure?"

"The ship-to-ship protocols are perfect. Its vocabulary is far greater than you could derive from standard nav chatter between a few ships, so they've been listening to all our insystem traffic—I'd say for several years at least. On the other hand, the vocabulary doesn't have anywhere near the range you'd get by monitoring entertainment multimede, so they probably arrived after the Broadcast Age."

"How well do they use the vocabulary they have?"

"They're using phrase-structure grammar, long-distance dependencies. FLN recursion, at least four levels deep and I see no reason why it won't go deeper with continued contact. They're not parrots, Jukka. They know the rules. That name, for example—"

"Rorschach," Bates murmered, knuckles cracking as she squeezed her pet ball. "Interesting choice."

"I checked the registry. There's an I–CAN freighter called Rorschach on the Martian Loop. Whoever we're talking to must regard their own platform the way we'd regard a ship, and picked one of our names to fit."

Szpindel dropped into the chair beside me, fresh from a galley run. A bulb of coffee glistened like gelatin in his hand. "That name, out of all the ships in the innersys? Seems way too symbolic for a random choice."

"I don't think it was random. Unusual ship names provoke comment; Rorschach's pilot goes ship-to-ship with some other vessel, the other vessel comes back with oh Grandma, what an unusual name you have, Rorschach replies with some off-the-cuff comment about nomenclatural origins and it all goes out in the EM. Someone listening to all that chatter not only figures out the name and the thing it applies to, but can get some sense of meaning from the context. Our alien friends probably eavesdropped on half the registry and deduced that Rorschach would be a better tag for something unfamiliar than, say, theSS Jaymie Matthews."

"Territorial and smart." Szpindel grimaced, conjuring a mug from beneath his chair. "Wonderful."

Bates shrugged. "Territorial, maybe. Not necessarily aggressive. In fact, I wonder if they could hurt us even if they wanted to."

"I don't," Szpindel said. "Those skimmers—"