Blindsight

“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, the SS 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—”

The major waved a dismissive hand. “Big ships turn slowly. If they were setting up to snooker us we’d see it well in advance.” She looked around the table. “Look, am I the only one who finds this odd? An interstellar technology that redecorates superJovians and lines up meteoroids like elephants on parade, and they were hiding? From us?”

“Unless there’s someone else out here,” James suggested uneasily.

Bates shook her head. “The cloak was directional. It was aimed at us and no one else.”

“And even we saw through it,” Szpindel added.

“Exactly. So they go to Plan B, which so far amounts to nothing but bluster and vague warnings. I’m just saying, they’re not acting like giants. Rorschach’s behavior feels — improvised. I don’t think they expected us.”

“’Course not. Burns-Caulfield was—”

“I don’t think they expected us yet.”

“Um,” Szpindel said, digesting it.

The major ran one hand over her naked scalp. “Why would they expect us to just give up after we learned we’d been sniped? Of course we’d look elsewhere. Burns-Caulfield could only have been intended as a delaying action; if I was them, I’d plan on us getting out here eventually. But I think they miscalculated somehow. We got out here sooner than they expected and caught them with their pants down.”